Vladimír Hučín

Who is Vladimír Hučín?

Vladimír Hučín is a Czech political celebrity and dissident of both communist and post/communist era.

In the 1970s and 80's he used explosives to destroy various propaganda symbols of communism and distributed anti-communist leaflets; he got caught and was tried four times, received various forms of punishment including imprisonment; he served a grand total of 40 months in prison. After his release from prison in 1987 he signed the Charter 77 proclamation. Even when he wasn't imprisoned he suffered extensive discrimination from the Czech communist authorities and their Secret Police. He was eventually rehabilitated of all the communist era convictions and they were rendered null and void.

After the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989 he worked in the Civic Commissions and later was nominated by the Confederation of Political Prisoners to work at the Security Information Service, a Czech intelligence agency and once admitted there, he achieved a rank of Captain and was regarded as one of the its best officers.

In 2001, when he came to the conclusion that an ultra-left wingers of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia were behind several unsolved explosions that took place in his home town of Prerov, he was fired from BIS and soon after that arrested and imprisoned on 7 unsubstantiated charges. He effectively became a political prisoner of the allegedly democratic regime of the president Václav Havel and government of the Czech Social Democratic Party. He was held in custody only few days short of a year and spent a portion of that time in a psychiatric hospital. In spite of numerous requests the then-president Havel refused to look into the matter and grant him clemency, even though Havel was well known for his extensive use of clemency while in office. Similarly several petitions with thousands of signatures to the Czech Senate went unheeded.