Billboard of the Creative Society sect in Bratislava-Petržalka. (source: Sme - Katarína Jakubjaková)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. A prosecutor involved in the investigation of a journalist who reported on a pro-Russian sect had herself been promoting the sect. The general prosecutor is silent.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
What Slovakia’s prosecution of a Czech journalist tells us
Remember this logo and make sure to avoid it, warned a Facebook page that the Slovak police force employs to warn citizens about fraudsters. It went on to describe the characteristics of a quasi-religious sect that it called a hybrid threat.
But another arm of the Slovak criminal justice system has been pushing in the opposite direction. Lucia Pavlaninová, a senior prosecutor at the Žilina Regional Prosecutor’s Office, fell for the twisted teachings of the sect, known as AllatRa – and has even been trying to proselytise her colleagues.
The public has learned about this only now, however – after it turned out that Pavlaninová was directly involved in pursuing an investigation against journalists and activists who had been looking into the practices of the sect in Slovakia. The scandal broke after the Czech news website Seznam Zprávy made public the information that the Slovak authorities were pursuing a prosecution against its reporter Kristína Ciroková, who had written specifically about AllatRa.
