When judges break the law

When the Supreme Court states in the David Rath corruption case that Prague Superior Court "violated the law in favor of the defendants" by denying the wiretaps as evidence, it's using a standard legal formulation that means nothing more than that a mistake was made in the application of the law. However, given the seriousness and strangeness of this particular mistake, perhaps the police and prosecutors should interpret it to mean that a criminal act was committed and act accordingly. When Respekt asked Senior Prague State Prosecutor Lenka Bradáčová last week whether Prague Superior Court was incompetent, bribed or of unsound mind when it declared the wiretaps to be inadmissible, she said that she of course couldn't speculate publicly about this. After yesterday's Supreme Court decision, the public deserves a non-speculative answer to the same question, even if mobile-phone tracking, bank-account analysis and, yes, wiretaps are needed.