Marie Benešová, former Justice Minister and deputy chair of the Social Democrats, has died at the age of 76. Jana Vaňhová, a former governor of Ústí nad Labem, confirmed the news to Czech Television. X nets David Soukup, chairman of the CTK Council, also informed. Benešová became Justice Minister in the government of Jiří Rusnok from July 2013 to January 2014, and then again in the government of Andrej Babiš from April 2019 to December 2021, then as a non-party member of the ANO movement.
Benešová was born on 17 April 1948. A graduate of Prague Law School, she worked for 20 years as a district prosecutor in Kladno before joining the General Prosecutor's Office of the Czech Republic (later the Supreme State Prosecutor's Office) in the early 1990s.
She was removed from her post in September 2005, one of the reasons being her closeness to the ČSSD. Then Justice Minister Pavel Němec claimed that Benešová was behaving more like a representative of a political party than an independent prosecutor. In December 2007, Benešová referred to Němec and others as part of the so-called "judicial mafia". Seven of the people she mentioned filed a personality protection lawsuit against her. The Prague High Court ruled in 2011 that Benešová must apologise. In early 2013, the Supreme Court upheld Benešová's appeal and ordered a new hearing. Two years later, the case ended in a settlement, with Benešová recovering the money she had paid as costs, but not withdrawing her apology.
After she accepted the post of minister in Rusnok's government, then-CSSD chief Bohuslav Sobotka wanted her to leave the party, which Benešová refused. After the 2013 elections, she sat in the Chamber of Deputies for the ČSSD. In 2017, she did not run for re-election and announced her retirement from politics. She justified this on the grounds of the situation in the Social Democrats, which she said had eradicated intra-party opposition.
Benešová was one of the people who were close to former President Miloš Zeman. She openly supported him in the 2013 election for head of state, although the ČSSD had its own candidate at the time. She later became a member of the president's advisory team.
In April 2019, Zeman appointed Benešová, then his adviser on justice, to succeed Justice Minister Jan Kněžinek. Kněžínek announced his intention to leave the government on 18 April, just one day after the state prosecutor's office announced a motion to file charges in the Čapí hní hzdo case, which included then-Prime Minister Andrej Babiš among the defendants. Opposition politicians criticised the change in the head of the Justice Ministry and linked it to the proposal to indict Babiš.
The minister's replacement triggered a wave of demonstrations organized by the Milion Chvilek association, which called the move purposeful and expressed fears that Babiš would bring the judiciary under his control. The demonstrators initially demanded primarily Benešová's departure, but the protests gradually turned to President Zeman and the demand for Babiš's resignation. More than a quarter of a million people gathered at the two main demonstrations on Letná Plain, the largest gatherings since 1989. Benešová, when she left her post in December 2021, said she believed the demonstrations against her appointment had unfairly damaged her professional reputation, adding that she now intends to mainly rest and later return to advocacy, but to a lesser extent than before she joined the ministry.
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