Eva Kostolanska, formerly a lawyer at the Ombudsman’s Office, took office yesterday as Public Defender of Rights after taking the oath of office before Chamber of Deputies Speaker Tomio Okamura (SPD). She replaces Stanislav Krecek, whose six-year term ended in February.
Kostolanska, 70, who was nominated by the Senate and the Czech Rectors’ Conference, was elected by members of the Chamber of Deputies in the second round of a secret ballot earlier this month, as the second female holder of the office. She defeated Klara Simackova Laurencikova, the former government commissioner for human rights, who was nominated by President Petr Pavel.
In the first round of the election in late May, attorney Vitezslav Dohnal, former Constitutional Court judge Jaromir Jirsa and the current deputy ombudsman, Vit Alexander Schorm, were eliminated. The evaluation committee had previously ranked Dohnal ahead of Simackova Laurencikova, with Schorm in third and Kostolanska and Jirsa tied for fourth. However, the committee’s opinion served only as a recommendation to members of parliament.
A graduate of the Faculty of Law at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Brno (now Masaryk University), Kostolanska has spent most of her professional life in public administration. She began her career as a lawyer at the South Moravian Regional National Committee, and then worked in financial administration from 1996 to 2020. She holds a state examination in German, and also studied at the law school of the University of Erlangen in Bavaria in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Kostolanska joined the Office of the Public Defender of Rights in 2020. Among other duties, she handled complaints addressed to the ombudsman, assessing their factual and legal merits and proposing next steps. She also participated in drafting legal opinions and recommendations for changes to legislation.
Kostolanska is the second woman to hold the office, after former dissident and human rights activist Anna Sabatova, who was Chief Ombudswoman from 2014 to 2020.
Krecek, an 88-year-old lawyer, was the long-time chair of the Czech Tenants’ Association and a Social Democratic Party member of parliament. He served in the Chamber of Deputies from 1998 to 2013. He was subsequently elected, upon the recommendation of the Senate and President Vaclav Klaus, to the position of deputy ombudsman, a role he held until 2019, when he failed to win reelection. A year later, however, he was selected by the Chamber of Deputies to serve as Ombudsman, a position he had unsuccessfully sought six years earlier.
