Legal services in the area of the right to keep and bear arms
The right to acquire, keep and bear arms is one of the fundamental rights of a citizen in a free society. For thousands of years, it has only been denied to those parts of society that were not considered completely free. In Czech history, the roots of the universal right to be armed go back primarily to the Hussite uprising, and then to the de facto constitutional recognition in the Treaty of St. Wenceslas of 1517.
The return of free civilian possession of arms after the Velvet Revolution was taken for granted following years of Nazi and Communist restrictions, and perhaps that is why it has not been subject of as much attention. This period of untroubled feeling of liberty came to a symbolic end in 2015, when the European Commission came up with a proposal for restrictions which, in some of their working versions, went beyond even our historical experience of communist dictatorship. A wave of civil resistance across Europe prevented the worst, but the time when we could take the free civilian possession of weapons for granted has come to an end.
My gradual involvement in this area of civil rights is also linked to this period. The discovery of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier was a watershed moment for me. Charb was a sport shooter and, as such, could only carry his pistols in a locked case on his way to the shooting range. As a man on a terrorist kill list who faced murder threats with weekly frequency and had already been physically assaulted, he applied for a permit to carry a gun for personal defense. The police did not grant the application. He was subsequently murdered by terrorists who bought illegal weapons smuggled through the EU's external borders from a dealer in a park near a train station.
I do not consider a country in which a citizen is legislatively deprived of the chance to defend themselves effectively against violence to be free. So for me, focusing my practice on civil rights in the area of civilian gun ownership is not just a matter of professional choice, but above all a matter of principled protection of liberty.
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