The Stadnicky family has recently also definitively lost the fight for the return of the Baroque chateau in Vranov US Supreme Court deals Bush administration blow over Guantanamo ...
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Czech Constitutional Court head fears politicisation of court ... nad Dyji. Most of the land the return of which the descendants demand are in the management of the Vranov Town Hall. The Stadnicky filed a complaint in 2000 and the Znojmo District Court, south Moravia, upheld it six years later.
However, the Brno Regional Court changed the verdict and decided that the heirs had no right to the property. The Supreme Court has recently confirmed the verdict. The heirs claim that the Stadnickys have never lost the property in accordance with law. According to the NS panel of judges headed by Josef Rakovsky, some plots of land could only be returned on the basis of the restitution laws and cannot be claimed in any other legal way. The 19 descendants of the noble family have been unsuccessfully fighting for the return of the chateau for years. Their complaint was turned down by district and regional courts and last October the Supreme Court rejected the heirs' appellate review. The Constitutional Court ruled on January 22 that the heirs' complaint was apparently unsubstantiated, saying the property is not subject to the restitution law and it cannot be claimed in other legal ways. The family lost the chateau during World War Two when the Nazi troops occupied the Czech Lands. The Regional Court justified the verdict, referring to the decision of the Czechoslovak Agriculture Ministry from 1949 that declared the chateau and adjacent plots state property. The then noble family representative, "a legal ancestor of the complainants," handed the chateau over to the state in the same year, the court says. The descendants of the Stadnicky family live all over the world. One of the complainants is Polish Elzbieta Sobanska from Warsaw who had her wedding at the Vranov chateau years ago.
(Ceske Noviny)
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