The new government led by Andrej Babiš has decided to secure control over the human rights agenda. Power is being shielded through the appointment of an official with no prior record in the defense of human rights, no documented experience in protecting minorities, and full integration into the country’s dominant political and social majority.
This decision is not incidental. It fits a recognizable institutional pattern in which positions intended to oversee the State end up functioning as buffers of conflict rather than as effective checks on power.
Taťána Malá, recently appointed as the government’s Commissioner for Human Rights, had not, prior to her nomination, played any publicly relevant role in defending historically vulnerable groups in the country, such as the Roma minority, foreigners, asylum seekers, or victims of institutional discrimination. There are likewise no records of her confronting the police, the prosecution service, or the judiciary over discriminatory practices. Her profile is legal and political, but not activist, nor linked to direct human rights defense.
Human rights under political control
Taťána Malá was appointed to the position by the government led by ANO, the political movement founded and controlled by Andrej Babiš. Babiš’s ability to impose this nomination is not circumstantial. It reflects a concentration of political and institutional power built over years, during which ANO has systematically occupied key ministries, oversight bodies, and strategic positions within the State.
Within this framework, the appointment of the human rights commissioner did not emerge from technical consensus or from a process grounded in specific credentials. It was a top-down political decision, consistent with the logic of control and loyalty that characterizes the internal functioning of the movement.
Mediation is not the defense of rights
One of the arguments used to justify Taťána Malá’s appointment as head of the human rights agenda is her experience as a mediator. However, mediation is not equivalent to the defense of human rights, either legally or in institutional practice.
Mediation is a mechanism for resolving private conflicts based on neutrality and the presumption of balance between the parties. A mediator does not investigate abuses, identify perpetrators, denounce discrimination, or confront power. Their role is to facilitate agreements, not to protect those who are structurally vulnerable.
Human rights defense, by contrast, begins precisely from asymmetry. It recognizes that certain groups — such as the Roma minority, foreigners, or asylum seekers — do not stand on equal footing with the State or the social majority. Defending rights requires taking a position, causing discomfort, denouncing abuses, and, when necessary, confronting institutions.
Confusing mediation with human rights defense is not a technical error. It is a political operation that turns the protection of minorities into conflict management and reduces structural violence to mere “disagreements” between supposedly equal parties.
In that framework, mediation does not strengthen human rights protection. It neutralizes it.
“Taťána Malá’s experience as a mediator does not amount to a human rights record. Mediation presupposes neutrality and balance between parties; rights protection requires siding with those subjected to structural discrimination. These are distinct functions and, in contexts of institutional racism, even incompatible.”
A sensitive post without substantive credentials
In democratic systems, officials responsible for human rights typically possess a clear mandate: experience in strategic litigation, work with victims, a background in independent organizations, or a history of confronting power when fundamental rights are violated. In this case, such credentials are absent.
The appointment is formally legal but lacks substantive legitimacy in human rights terms. What is at issue is not the official’s administrative capacity, but the absence of specific experience in a field that, by definition, requires challenging the State itself.
Majority versus minorities
The Czech social context deepens the significance of this appointment. In a country where the majority of the population does not experience systematic rights violations, placing a representative of that majority at the head of the human rights agenda raises a structural problem: distance from the lived reality of discrimination.
This is not about identity, but about function. Defending minorities such as the Roma community entails confronting entrenched prejudices, normalized administrative practices, and, at times, judicial or police decisions. That task requires not only training, but prior experience and credibility in the eyes of victims. Without it, the position risks becoming a manager of reports rather than a defender of rights.
Why this appointment?
The designation of Taťána Malá as government commissioner for human rights raises questions the Executive has not answered — questions that are central to understanding the true scope of the role.
The most obvious one comes first: why place a figure with no documented human rights record at the head of an office designed precisely to monitor the State itself?
It is also legitimate to ask why no candidate with proven experience in minority protection, victim advocacy, or the denunciation of institutional abuse was chosen.
The decision gains further weight when one considers that the government appointed a representative of the political and social majority, with no professional or lived experience of exclusion, to a role that demands understanding and confronting structural inequality.
The core question remains unresolved: whom is this appointment meant to reassure — the victims of discrimination or the institutions under scrutiny?
Institutional extension where power is shielded
The decision is especially significant in a context where complaints of racism, segregation, and unequal treatment recurrently affect specific groups — Roma people, foreigners, asylum seekers — and where the human rights commissioner should act as a counterweight to power, not as its extension.
If defending human rights entails discomfort, denunciation, and political cost, it is legitimate to ask whether this appointment responds to the need to protect those whose rights are violated or, instead, to shield an especially sensitive institutional area.
The post as a mechanism of control
In Czech institutional practice, the human rights portfolio has tended to operate more as a channel for containment than as an agent of transformation. Appointing a figure with no record of troubling those in power reinforces that logic: listening without confronting, recording without correcting, dialoguing without demanding accountability.
The absence of a history defending minorities does not appear accidental. It functions as a guarantee of institutional predictability. A profile without prior conflict with the State ensures that complaints will not escalate into political crises or structural challenges. Rather than oversight, the design confirms that power is shielded through the management of conflict.
A clear message
The implicit message is twofold. For those in power, reassurance: nothing will overflow. For minorities, skepticism: protection will remain rhetorical. In a context of recurring complaints of racism, segregation, and institutional violence, the shielding of the human rights agenda completes an architecture designed to manage the problem, not to resolve it.
Because in a country where the majority does not suffer rights violations, placing a representative of that majority at the head of the human rights agenda is not inclusion.
It is institutional shielding.
When oversight is emptied of substance, power is shielded and rights are reduced to rhetoric.