Corruption as a malfunction

Hearing talk all the time about how corrupt the Czech Republic is can get on one's nerves after a while. Especially if these talks are true. But the time has come for more optimism: after years without direction or the will to do anything about it, people with solid plans have taken up the government anti-corruption agenda. Furthermore, it's also becoming apparent that bribers have already lost a piece of their corruption kingdom. And it wasn't that complicated.

It seems incredible but until recently something as mundane as registering a new company here recalled the chapters from Kafka's The Castle. Once a person climbed to the top floor of Prague's City Court, he was welcomed by a door with bars and the uncompromising looks of the court guards. Just waiting to be entered in the business register meant a six-month wait, so those in a hurry reached into their pockets in order to speed along their applications. The court dealt with half of all applications in the country. It was the perfect breeding ground for corruption. Some of the lawyers who had the best access to the administrators processing the applications made money off a system that didn't work. It went so far that, to the surprise of her colleagues, one administrator was led away by police directly from her office to a hearing.

You're going into the wilderness

„I said to myself: Enough. Something must be done about this,“ says a greying judge sporting a black t-shirt under a…