Pezold claimed the vault as a heiress of its last noble owner, Adolf Schwarzenberg. The Supreme Court turned down Pezold's appellate review as unsubstantiated. Pezold has already filed other suits with Czech courts, claiming the return of dozens of other real estates owned by the Hluboka branch of the Schwarzenberg family, but she has failed so far. Lower level courts rejected Pezold's complaints aimed to determine the property ownership.
They ruled that she could claim the property only on the basis of restitution laws. Moreover, the appeals court recalls that the Hluboka branch of the Schwarzenberg family lost the property, including the chateaus in the UNESCO-listed Cesky Krumlov and Hluboka nad Vltavou, both South Bohemia, on the basis of a special Czechs might boycott Olympics in Russian Sochi - minister ...
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Czech ForMin wants Prague to ratify Lisbon treaty by year-end ... law from 1947, which is still embedded in the Czech Republic's legal order and has never been abolished. The neo-Gothic Schwarzenberg vault, where 26 family ancestors are buried, is a popular tourist destination in south Bohemia. Pezold has been striving for the property of the Hluboka branch of the Schwarzenberg family since the 1990s. The second, Orlik branch, of the Schwarzenberg family, represented by current Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, has regained its immense property in the Czech Republic in restitution proceedings. Pezold recently challenged the controversial law called "lex Schwarzenberg" on the basis of which the property of the Hluboka family branch was confiscated with the Constitutional Court. She said the law was at variance with the then constitution. The originally Austrian Schwarzenberg noble family settled down in the Czech Lands for centuries, owning almost the whole of South Bohemia. The Hluboka branch of the family owned the estates of Hluboka, Cesky Krumlov, Lovosice, Postoloprty, Protivin, Vimperk and Trebon at the beginning of the 20th century. The property was confiscated by the Nazis in 1940. Adolf Schwarzenberg left for exile from which he never returned after WWII. He died abroad in 1950. After the war, his property was subject to "national administration," and the farm land and premises were confiscated on the basis of the post-war Benes decrees that provided for the confiscation of the property of collaborators, traitors, ethnic Germans and Hungarians, except for those who themselves suffered under the Nazis. Pezold considers the step unjust, arguing that Adolf Schwarzenberg was well known as an opponent of Nazism and that her father Jindrich Schwarzenberg was even imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Experts today estimate the value of the confiscated property of the Hluboka branch of the Schwarzenberg family at 40 billion crowns. ($1=16.960 crowns)
(Ceske Noviny)
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