"At the end of the trial the parties made their closing speeches, and Pavel Kohout said, among other things, that in his opinion he did not expect a fair verdict anyway, and he would immediately justify it: that at the beginning of this dispute on the defendant's side was Vilém Nový, a member of the Central Committee and another high-ranking official, and on the plaintiffs' side was a writer, a chess grandmaster, a student and an athlete. When this lawsuit ends, the defendant side is again Vilém Nový, a member of the Central Committee and a high-ranking official, and the plaintiff side is a writer who is not allowed to publish, a chess grandmaster who is in prison, a student leader who was expelled from college, and a top athlete who, although he has resigned, is employed in a menial job."
(From the speeches of personalities at the Faculty of Law of Charles University after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops): 'I would say it was kind of... a bit forced. Of course the student population was kind of sensitive. Now Smrkovský came in there and said how it was and that there were going to be limits beyond which he wouldn't go, and he made some kind of a speech, and I know that Professor [Zdeněk] Jičínský came in and he told Smrkovský that a politician who looks for the limits of retreat will never find them. I remember such an episode. There was - I don't know, Emil Zátopek, he also gave a speech there, but there was more... he was trying to entertain the audience, and otherwise the atmosphere... I would say that the people who would approve of it, they didn't show up at all. They were on the sidelines, silent and waiting for their time to come."
"The fact is that my dad came to work at that town hall and had a blank application form for a self-help party on his desk. So he was pretty upset about it, he was talking to my grandfather, and my grandfather [Ladislav] Tvarůžek [director of the Czechoslovak Press Agency during the First Republic and a former agrarian] said to him: 'Jiří, what you hear from our friends and acquaintances, that it will fall until autumn, that the communists will collapse, that in six months the fun will be over, don't believe it! The Communists are supported from Moscow and until something happens in Moscow, and it certainly won't happen there, the Communists will be here. If you want to have a bit of a decent job and if you want your children to study'- my sister had already been born -'then I suggest you sign it.' So he signed it. Then they fired him..."
JUDr. Jiří Štelovský was born on 17 August 1945 in Prague into a family with a strong intellectual and journalistic tradition. He spent his childhood in a villa in Hřebenky, built by his grandfather Ladislav Tvarůžek, the interwar director of the Czechoslovak Press Agency (ČTK). The family environment was shaped by Masaryk values, education and a critical attitude towards totalitarian regimes. His father, Ing. Jiří Štelovský worked as a clerk at the municipality, while his mother Jarmila Štelovská, née Tvarůžková, handled complaints at the Motokov foreign trade company. Both parents were dismissed from work in the 1950s for political reasons and had to settle for menial jobs. After graduating from secondary school in 1965, he studied law in the relaxed atmosphere of the 1960s, attending seminars by the later Chartist Zdeněk Jičínský, which later caused State Security (StB) to take an interest in him. After graduating in 1970, he joined the District Court for Prague 1 as a judicial candidate and became a witness in the politically sensitive trial of Jan Palach in the so-called „cold fire“ affair. His ambition to become a judge was thwarted by the normalisation checking process. Although he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in his final year of law school in the hope of change, he was expelled and went into the corporate world. He worked as a lawyer at Plynoproject, a Tomos company, and in the 1980s returned to Plynoproject again, where he remained until 1989. From the end of the 1970s, Jiří Štelovský was on the State Security´s radar as a possible candidate of secret cooperation. He refused the offer of cooperation in a single interrogation. Nevertheless, he remained on the register, and in the 1980s the secret security service re-set another volume on him under the name „Lawyer“. It was only when his application for a judgeship after the Velvet Revolution was refused that he found out that State Security had registered him as a candidate of secret cooperation (KTS), based on information from a classmate and long-time friend who was supposed to recruit him for secret police and denounced him to the secret services. From 1989 until 1999, when he retired, the witness ran his own law firm. In 2026 he was living in Prague.
