Czech Lawyer-Activist Who Defended Domestic Violence Victims Sparks Controversy After Representing Alleged Male Perpetrators

It’s been an eventful year for Lucie Hrda.

The 44-year-old lawyer has spent a good part of the past two decades defending the rights of victims of sexual and domestic violence – most of them women – in Czechia to become one of the most well-known faces of the fight against general ignorance and public indifference on a topic that only slowly made its way to the frontline of public debate.

For her work in debunking the myths surrounding sexual violence, fighting against the trivialisation of victims’ testimonies, or against the so-called ‘secondary victimisation’ victims are often forced to go through during judicial proceedings, she has received awards, public praise and media recognition in equal measure.

Until last year that is, when reports about her work as a defence attorney for people accused of the crimes she was known to fight against sparked a debate about how, if at all, it is possible to combine the jobs of public activist and lawyer – and what either of those activities actually entail.

Giving a voice to victims

“I don’t think people have been listening to me,” Hrda tells BIRN as we meet in her legal firm’s offices in central Prague. “For years, I’ve always said that we offered legal representation to the accused, and that this is where we make money. My work with victims has always been something additional, not what I do for a living, something I’ve been doing because I want to change something in the system.”

Hrda’s work in the field dates to the early 2000s when, still a law student at university, she joined the White Circle of Safety, a crime victims support association, where she started specialising in criminal law – very much a “men-only quarters” at the time – and became known for offering legal aid to victims of serious offences.

“It might sound weird today, but victims were rarely offered legal aid at that time, and for the few lawyers taking on the cases, being paid for it was the exception rather than the rule,” she says, adding that she “pretty much worked for almost ten years for free” on such occasions.

This partially changed with the passing of the 2013 Victims Rights’ Act, an EU-inspired and landmark legislative reform according to Hrda, which for the first time provided a precise legal definition of victims, made them full-fledged subjects of criminal proceedings, and defined what kind of legal assistance they were entitled to.

Judges are still very much against receiving mandatory training in that area; they claim it would go against their independence, which is quite absurd.”

– Lucie Hrda

Hrda started her own law firm in 2009 focusing on criminal and family law, which she continues to head to this day. “Throughout all that time, I’ve also been kind of an activist, loudly speaking about the problems of representation for victims of sexual or domestic abuse, how they remain underrepresented and badly treated in criminal proceedings,” she says.

With five other women, she founded the Bez Trestu (Without Penalty) association during COVID-19, “a platform to talk widely about these issues rather than purely on a case-by-case basis,” she explains.

The goal was to highlight the systemic shortcomings of the judicial system in that area, including the widespread tendency to hand out mild or suspended sentences for people found guilty of rape, and the related problem of judges’ lack of education and experience in victimology.

“Judges are still very much against receiving mandatory training in that area; they claim it would go against their independence, which is quite absurd,” Hrda tells BIRN.

“For a long time there really wasn’t much interest about the issue of intimate violence in the Czech Republic, whether in the media or from politicians,” she says. “The fact that we [at Bez Trestu] started publishing courts decisions really helped people realise that ridiculously low sentences were being handed to violent offenders, and that victimology myths were behind those rulings.”

The issue has since gained prominence in domestic public debate, with the global #MeToo movement eventually making its way to the Czech Republic, several high-profile cases of sexual abuse making the headlines, and politicians finally taking on the mantle. Only last year, progress included a reform of the Czech criminal code to define rape based on the notion of consent and considered any sexual act with children under 12s as rape or sexual attack. The lower house of the Czech parliament is also currently discussing a government bill to strengthen the protection of victims of domestic violence.

“We’re going to have to wait a few years to see what kind of impact the new legal definition of rape has,” Hrda argues, saying that similar reforms in other countries “led to an increase in the number of rapes reported, but also to a higher rate of non-guilty verdicts.”

Today, only about 5 per cent of rapes are estimated to be reported to authorities, and just 7-10 per cent of cases of domestic abuse. About one-third of women are believed to have experienced some form of sexualised or domestic violence from their partner.

‘Switching sides’

The work of Bez Trestu, along with other organisations and activists working in the field, has been instrumental in shifting the public’s thinking, putting the victims back at the heart of the judicial process, and taking a swing at a culture of pervasive insensitivity and entrenched impunity.

Then, in September last year, Hrda left the association she co-founded, with both sides insisting it was based on mutual agreement. “Lucie Hrda’s role in the case of Judge Svanhal proved to be incompatible with the values of the association,” the NGO said in a statement. “We do not identify with the way of defence [which is] itself a trivialisation of violence.”

What was referred to in this statement and lies at the heart of the very public falling out was Hrda’s role as defence counsel for Roman Svanhal, a judge from the town of Zdar nad Sazavou in central Czechia, whose entire case was painstakingly covered in the Czech media, including through the investigative mini-series Tyrant’s Justicepublished by Seznam Zpravy.

After a years long court case, Svanhal received a suspended sentence after being found guilty of abuse against his former spouse – a crime the Supreme Court later downgraded to a simple misdemeanour. Svanhal was also additionally fined for directing false accusations against his ex-partner, before being acquitted of these charges only in December by an appeals court.

Part of the public backlash was linked to Svanhal being allowed to keep his position as a judge despite his conviction. The other part was related to who represented him in the proceedings, with Hrda’s decision to take up the case seen by some as incomprehensible, by others as simply reprehensible.

“I left Bez Trestu because I did not want them to be connected with what was being said about me in the media,” Hrda tells BIRN a few months after the breakup, which followed weeks of controversy that saw her reputation as a champion for victims’ rights tarnished in the media.

For a long time, they’ve been trying to pass on information to the media, it just happens that this time someone decided to publish.”

– Lucie Hrda

Accusations of ‘playing both sides at once’ were directed at the lawyer, who emphasised repeatedly that she never tried to conceal or lie about her activities as a defence lawyer for the accused.

Hrda said she has been receiving threats in the wake of the reports, claiming to BIRN it is the work of “some stalkers, who for years have been coming to my courthouse appearances to discredit me.”

“For a long time, they’ve been trying to pass on information to the media, it just happens that this time someone decided to publish,” she says.

It is important to stress that there is nothing illegal in the two hats worn by Hrda, one in defence of alleged offenders, the other as a spokeswoman for alleged victims. The moral and ethical dilemma, however, is easy to surmise, as are the practical implications for victims’ representation and trust in judicial proceedings.

Johanna Nejedlova, another prominent women’s rights advocate and head of the Konsent association, said of the controversy surrounding Hrda: “It’s not that it’s illegal to defend perpetrators, they of course have a right to defend themselves, but we think that when someone fights for the rights of victims, they shouldn’t be in a position to speak out against those victims.”

Hrda insists that she will continue supporting victims of sexual and domestic abuse. Bez Trestu, meanwhile, has indefinitely suspended its activities since the announcement.

Self-defeating agendas?

In the wake of the Svanhal fallout, local media published testimonies of witnesses which, they claims, hint at the lawyer’s self-contradicting practice of the law.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, witnesses point to Hrda using the same tactics to delegitimise victims’ testimonies that the activist criticised as responsible for “secondary victimisation” and for victims’ reluctance to report the crime in the first place. In other words, of doing as a defence attorney what she had been warning against as a public activist.

“It is incomprehensible to me how someone can function in such a way – to crush a victim of domestic violence in court in the morning and write a militant article against domestic violence in the newspaper in the afternoon,” one of them was quoted as saying by Hospodarske Noviny.

Citing attorney-client privilege, Hrda refuses to discuss the details of specific cases. “I don’t pick my cases,” she insists, adding that her office often deals with cases of divorce or separation where false claims of domestic or sexual abuse are fabricated by a spouse to win child-custody battles.

“As a defence lawyer, I have a high ratio of non-guilty verdicts,” she tells BIRN, which she says points to a widespread “misuse of criminal law in family and custody court battles.”

[I]f I had to count how many times she’s helped me with a case that we are currently resolving and that no one else helped us with, I wouldn’t be able to.”

– Barbora Urbanova, Czech lower house MP

Turning the tables on her critics, Hrda claims it is these false accusers – rather than her work as a defence lawyer – “who actually harm the real victims of sexual and domestic violence” and undermines the trust of the entire justice system – from police officers to judges and prosecutors – towards those who were and are truly oppressed.

In previous public statements, she further slammed her detractors for “turning what I do for a living against me because [they] know that I cannot comment on it,” while accusing fellow lawyers of being “unethical” in commenting “on whether or not I can take on certain cases.”

She also emphasises the simple financial aspects of it: “Last year, our office had a loss of 2.5 million Czech crowns [about 100,000 euros] for our work representing victims. We do it because we want to and because we think it’s necessary.”

Citing the courts’ refusal to properly cover their legal fees, she is now on strike. “We do not represent victims anymore” – a move that once again appears to contradict her previous activism to ensure proper representation, and which she justifies as a way “to put pressure on the courts and the Justice Ministry” to ensure fair compensation for those willing to handle such cases.

Some in the non-profit sector have deplored Hrda’s actions, with activists from organisations such as Konsent, the Czech branch of Amnesty International or proFem publicly speaking out against her.

Others have come out in the defence of the lawyer. According to Barbora Urbanova, an MP and outspoken voice for women’s rights in the lower house of parliament, the problem is “not whether Lucie Hrda is defending the perpetrator or not.”

“First, she is quite open about it, and second, if I had to count how many times she’s helped me with a case that we are currently resolving and that no one else helped us with, I wouldn’t be able to,” Urbanova argued, pointing instead to the more “systemic” problem that makes it nearly impossible for lawyers to make a decent living only representing the victims’ side.

…And justice for all

Hrda insists that part of the storm she has faced is linked to people’s misunderstanding of the work that lawyers do, especially defence attorneys, which leads to them being routinely vilified and demonised in the media or movies.

“The work of an activist is the work you do outside of your main job,” she explained, a way to point out errors or shortcomings in the system. “As a defence lawyer, you’re there as a lawyer who stands behind your client, and we don’t care which side we support because we always support our clients.”

Except in specific court-ordered cases, lawyers are free to accept cases or not. But as some scholars have pointed out, “it is an essential principle that people are not denied representation because lawyers (or anyone else) regard them as undesirable or morally reprehensible,” with “the risk greatest when there are powerful matters of belief in play and the moral climate of the society is hostile to the group of which the client forms part.”

Once they do accept to take on a client, the Code of Ethics of the Czech Bar Association states that, “the legitimate interests of the client take precedence over the lawyer’s own interests… The lawyer is not authorised to verify the truthfulness of factual information provided by the client without his/her consent.”

At the same time, Czech law on advocacy states that, “a lawyer is obliged to act honestly and conscientiously, is obliged to use all legal means consistently and within their framework to apply in the interests of the client everything that he/she believes to be beneficial.”

Yet for Hrda, too often “people somehow connect the accused person with the attorney, they take them as one person.”

For justice to be fair, representation must be blind – a precondition to the most fundamental tenets of criminal justice, from to right to legal aid to the belief that anyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law (and not the quick-tempered court of public opinion).

Defending the defendant can be conducted decently, honestly and professionally, there is no need to humiliate other people.”

– Adela Horejsi, lawyer

Outside of the Czech Republic, the case of Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who came under fire after joining Harvey Weinstein’s legal team a few years ago, comes to mind. “My representation of those accused of sexual assault does not speak to my personal views on any of these matters,” he said after both withdrawing from the Weinstein counsel team and losing his Harvard dean position.

Defending the idea of representing people considered “guilty, unpopular, vile or undesirable,” he continued: “To the degree we deny unpopular defendants basic due process rights, we cease to be the country we imagine ourselves to be. In fact, most of the due process rights we hold dearest derive from lawyers who represented unpopular defendants.”

For Sullivan, the alpha and omega of such cases lie in “the tension between protecting the rights of the criminally accused and treating survivors of sexual violence with respect.” This is a line some believe Hrda may have trespassed or forgotten in her representation of some defendants.

“Most criminal lawyers represent both the injured and the accused,” said Adela Horejsi, a lawyer who has represented female victims in one of Czechia’s most recent high-profile sexual abuse cases. “The essence of the problem is the way it is done. Defending the defendant can be conducted decently, honestly and professionally, there is no need to humiliate other people.”

While defence lawyers may not lie or induce others to lie, the burden of factual proof lies with the prosecution, the job of the former being to raise enough legitimate doubts about the case at hand. And with the laws changing towards wider, more holistic understandings of what constitutes rape or domestic abuse, the burden of proof tends to grow heavier – and the possibility of doubt stronger.

“I think people have to understand that the right for legal aid is for both the victim and the accused, and in my cases a lot of them are found innocent,” Hrda tells BIRN. “People need to understand the work of a lawyer, and they’re always free not to accept it. But that’s also part of the job, you cannot comment on specific cases even if you’re attacked, you can just sit there and take the insults.”

“And I’m okay with that,” she adds.