Ombudsman wrote to the Prime Minister regarding the proposed building law

Brno/Prague - The Ministry for Regional Development (MMR), according to the public defender of rights Stanislav Křeček, is proceeding unusually regarding the proposal for a new building law. Křeček has turned to Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) about this. The ombudsman's office stated this on its website today. The Czech National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) joined the ombudsman today. The ministry's statement is being sought by ČTK.

"From the very beginning of the preparation of the new building law, I have been missing thoughtfulness, professionalism, and appropriateness on the part of the ministry. I consider it unacceptable for a revision of such a fundamental regulation to occur in the manner we are witnessing. Not only is the ministry acting non-transparently, disregarding the government's legislative rules, but it is also wasting the work of dozens of experts," Křeček stated. He added that the form of the new building law is crucial primarily for the economic development of the country and that, in his opinion, the rushed work of the ministry could do more harm than good.

"The ministry deliberately does not provide all the materials, and because they build on each other and reference one another, it is almost impossible to comment on them. The office sets deadlines for comments in unrealistic terms, although the Chamber of Commerce had more than a year to prepare the law," Václav Girsa, president of the Czech committee of ICOMOS, told ČTK today. The organization fears that the impacts of the current situation on the economy will be used as an argument to push through the new building law, at the expense of the protection of cultural monuments, and even at the cost of bypassing legislative rules. "After all, these voices have already begun to emerge from Prague developers," Girsa reminds.

According to him, MMR inexplicably insists on the integration of heritage care in the protective zones of cultural monuments into building authorities. "Heritage conservationists will thus not be able to have a binding say in the construction activities in the immediate vicinity of the most significant cultural monuments listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This particularly concerns Prague, but not just it. The ministry argues that this is how the substantive proposal of the law prepared by the Chamber of Commerce was defined; however, it does not insist on the same principle in the protection of areas other than monuments," Girsa stated.

The new building law is set to significantly simplify and expedite building procedures. It is currently under review. This was originally moved from the end of January to the end of March. The Ministry for Regional Development asked the Prime Minister to postpone it to the end of April due to the situation surrounding the coronavirus.

The ombudsman stated that the review process is atypical. "Together with the institutions that joined my open letter, we publicly reject the approach of the proposer, who initially provided us with a mere five working days to draft and submit comments, and only after my objections extended the deadline (not sufficiently). The essence remains that the proposal has significantly changed and was therefore not subjected to the review process in full," the letter to the Prime Minister states.