FREEDOM AND ITS THREATS

A European Salon with Anna Šabatová

FREEDOM AND ITS THREATS

The peaceful revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe sparked enthusiasm in Western Europe and also a certain interest in nations such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc., but this soon gave way to routine and ignorance.

The political turnaround was fuelled by popular movements; civil rights groups and dissident movements such as Charter 77 and others who had called for human rights, liberalism, democracy and pluralism. Thirty years later, pluralism, liberalism and human rights are under threat in a different way - and ultimately in every European nation. The rise of right-wing extremism, concepts of „illiberal democracy“ and an expansive, imperial Russia are just some of the threats. Many in the West have overlooked the latter for far too long.

As an observer and protagonist, hardly anyone has as good an overview of these decades and periods of change as Anna Šabatová, who was one of the first signatories of Charter 77, later worked in various functions and NGOs, was Chairwoman of the Czech Helsinki Committee and held the office of Czech Ombudswoman until 2020. A conversation about long-term opposition experiences, the political situation in the Czech Republic and the many blind spots of the Western view.

Anna Šabatová, philologist and civil rights activist

Robert Misik, Author and journalist

Anna Šabatová is a Czech civil rights activist and former Czechoslovak dissident. She played a key role in the work of Charter 77 and its projects, sometimes as a spokesperson. From 2001 to 2007 she was Deputy Czech Ombudsman and from February 2014 to February 2020 she was Ombudswoman, Czech „public defender of human rights“ (veřejná ochránkyně práv). Šabatová has been chairwoman of the Czech Helsinki Committee since 2008. She was born in Brno as the daughter of the leading dissident intellectual Jaroslav Šabata and is the widow of long-time opposition activist Petr Uhl. Anna Šabatová now lives in Prague.

The „European Salon“ is organised in cooperation with the Willi Eichler Academy
as part of the „Transformation of Remembrance - Transformation of Reappraisal“ series.