Legal awkwardness

Despite officials’ repeated statements to the contrary, some experts have done a bit more digging: they found that Prague’s pro-Israeli credentials may not be as straightforward as they might seem and that the recognition of Palestine by communist Czechoslovakia more than 35 years ago could complicate things.

“I wonder… what that would mean if the Czech Republic recognised Palestine once again, if there is even the need to recognise Palestine again,” pondered Irena Kalhousova, one of the leading Czech experts on the Middle East and head of the Herzl Centre for Israeli Studies at Charles University in Prague.

Kalhousova was referring to late 1988, when a UN General Assembly resolution was passed that “acknowledges the proclamation of the state of Palestine” made by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Algiers and “affirms the need to enable the Palestinian people to exercise their sovereignty over their territory occupied since 1967.

Thus, as some experts have pointed out, communist Czechoslovakia – along with other Soviet satellites – de facto recognised Palestinian statehood in November 1988 on the basis of this UNGA resolution.

Additionally, a constitutional act that came into effect on December 31, 1992 as the now-democratic Czechoslovakia was breaking up stated that “the Czech Republic recognises all states and governments that the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic recognised on the date of its dissolution.”

According to Filip Krepelka, head of the department of international and European law at Masaryk University, such an issue should be clarified. “The Czech Republic declared that it recognised all the countries that were recognised by Czechoslovakia and never took any formal step in the opposite direction to ‘derecognise’ Palestine,” he tells BIRN.

He further emphasises that Czechs have a diplomatic mission in Ramallah and that there is a Palestinian embassy in Prague.

Across the border, Slovakia followed a slightly different path as it explicitly reconfirmed its recognition of Palestine after the 1993 split.

But experts remain divided on the legality and meaning of the 1988 proclamation. “Our statement from 1988, when the state of Palestine declared statehood, can be read in different ways,” believes Veronika Bilkova, head of the international law department at Charles University. “According to contemporary sources, the statement was intentionally formulated ambiguously because the then-socialist Czechoslovakia did not necessarily want to recognise Palestine but was under strong pressure from the Soviet Union to do so.”

But later steps, like having a Palestinian embassy, “could probably be described as tacit recognition… There is a big question mark over our position at the moment,” she insisted.

Some politicians have also echoed this claim. “I worked in the foreign affairs committee of the Chamber of Deputies around 2018, and I was simply told that because Czechoslovakia recognised Palestine in 1988 and the Czech Republic accepted all these recognitions of the state as a whole in 1993, that’s just the way it is and nothing can be done about it,” said former Pirate MEP Mikulas Peksa.

Over the years, Czech authorities have addressed and tried to dismiss the topic as a non-issue. In a 2020 analysis, for instance, the Foreign Ministry argued that the 1988 statement was not an official recognition but rather “the recognition of the declaration” and a mere “political act due to the politics and organisation of international relations at the time.”

“The Palestinian state did not meet the conditions for statehood [as defined by the 1933 Montevideo Convention]. The Czech Republic has not yet recognised the Palestinian state”, the Foreign Ministry declared in 2020. The 1988 move “was not intended to have any legal effect,” it said in a declaration last September.

Last year, a Foreign Ministry official added: “We do not recognise the Palestinian state because it simply has not yet been established. I do not think there is any need to comment on it further.”

Meanwhile, public opinion also seems more divided on the issue than ever. Recent polls have shown that the Czech population is far less pro-Israeli than its political class, something past studies had also looked into in detail. While the general mood does tend to lean towards supporting Israel more than Palestine, most voters seem either undecided or choose to adopt a neutral stance.

A CVVM survey from last year additionally found that over a third of Czechs agree that Palestine should be recognised as a sovereign and independent state, and 20 per cent opposed to such recognition. Many of them might be surprised to learn that this might already be the case.