Regional Court in Prague: When judicial nonsense is simply rewritten as a typographical error

Imagine a simple situation. You go to court because you believe that your children's case is being processed too slowly. Money for a broken phone or a neighborly dispute over a fence are not settled. Children, their relationship with their parents and time that will never come back are dealt with. The Regional Court in Prague will decide on your proposal. The Senate consists of the chairwoman JUDr. Ivana Švehlová and judge Mgr. Jana Pokorná Stejskalová and JUDr. Lenka Škubalová. You would expect the high court to be the place of maximum accuracy. That before he writes the decisive facts in the decision, he opens the file, checks the data, reads who filed what, and verifies what is really in the decisions of the lower court. But then comes Resolution No. 104 UL 35/2026-16 and a story begins that would be grotesque if it did not concern human lives.

In the decision, the Regional Court wrote, among other things, that the expert opinion was commissioned as "urgent". But he didn't stop there either. From the alleged haste, he drew another categorical conclusion: according to the court, the opinion should have been requested "with the utmost urgency, even at the expense of other expert opinions commissioned so far." It sounds convincing. So the court obviously cares, the opinion has absolute priority, everything is running at maximum speed and objections to delays seem almost absurd.

But then comes the problem. This construction will not stand. After being notified of the errors, the same Regional Court in Prague issues a corrective order No. 104 UL 35/2026-25 on September 9, 2026. And things start to disappear.

The claim that the opinion was requested as "urgent"? Away. The whole sentence about "highest urgency" and even processing at the expense of other expert opinions? Away. An indication that a certain objection was filed by the petitioner? Corrected - it was the mother. Date June 30, 2026? Corrected to 30 April 2026. Two months of difference in the proceedings, in which it was judged whether it was moving fast enough.

And it all fits under the institution of correction of manifest wrongness.

This is no longer a single typo. It's not a missing comma, a reversed digit in the zip code, or a misspelled year. When the court writes "6/30." instead of "30. 4.", one can imagine a mechanical slip. When they confuse the designation of one participant with another, and from other parts of the file the error is evident at first glance, it can also be a correctable error. But what about the whole evaluative reasoning that the expert opinion is handled with the "highest urgency" at the expense of other opinions? That's not a typo anymore. That's the argument. And this argument was used to explain why, according to the court, there were no delays.

At the same time, only a few months before, on June 9, 2026, in Resolution No. 30 Cdo 921/2026-277, the Supreme Court explicitly reminded that § 164 of the Code of Civil Procedure serves to correct formal and mechanical errors, not to additionally revise the argumentative basis of the decision. The same boundary was previously defined by the Constitutional Court in Judgment II. ÚS 1456/11. In other words: the corrective order should not be a magic eraser that can be used to erase the problematic part of the court's reasoning after notifying the participant and pretend that it was just a clerical error.

And this is where a much bigger problem begins than a dispute over one specific resolution. Court decisions are not schoolwork. They decide on property, freedom, children, family relationships, reputation, and sometimes literally the shape of a person's entire future life. A single wrong sentence can change the optics of the case. A misattributed procedural step can create the impression that the delay was caused by someone who was not at fault. An incorrect date can fundamentally distort the length of a certain phase of the proceedings. And the fictional construction of "highest urgency" can offer the public and the participant an image of an active trial, which may not correspond to the actual course of the case at all.

At the same time, it is not possible to honestly claim that we know why the errors occurred. We do not know whether someone skimmed the file, whether there was a mechanical transmission of incorrect data or some other error. That would be speculation. But it is precisely the amount of subsequently corrected data that raises a legitimate question: how thorough was the review of the decision that was supposed to assess delays in a sensitive guardianship matter?

And here is another paradox. In the original resolution, even the postal code of the participant was wrongly stated - 280 02 instead of 288 02. This classic technical error was explicitly pointed out. Nevertheless, it remained untouched in the rectification resolution. However, the entire evaluation passage about the highest urgency has disappeared. The typo remained. The argument disappeared. This is what Czech judicial absurdity looks like in a few lines.

Even more serious is the procedural context. The regional court is not the first article of the system from which the public would expect rookie mistakes. It is a higher court and normally performs an appellate function. In this particular case, it did not rule as a classic appellate court, but as a court competent to rule on a motion to determine a deadline pursuant to Section 174a of the Act on Courts and Judges. However, the result is all the harder for the participant: the law does not allow an appeal against a decision on such a proposal.

So you get a decision containing several wrong data. You cannot appeal the decision. You point out errors. And the court will rewrite the part through a corrective order.

Is this an image of justice that is supposed to inspire confidence?

It is not a requirement that judges be penalized for every misspelled digit. Judicial independence is one of the safeguards of the rule of law and must be protected. But independence cannot mean immunity from criticism. And it cannot mean that the quality of the decision ceases to be a public topic. A judge's personal responsibility for the content of an individual decision is very limited for good reasons, and a procedural or legal error itself usually does not mean a personal sanction. This is precisely why remedies, control by higher courts and, above all, the professionalism of decision-making itself must work exceptionally well.

But what if the higher court makes several mistakes at once? What if there is no appeal against his decision? And what if the problematic argumentation is then simply removed as "obviously incorrect"?

Then all you have to do is ask out loud.

The regional court in Prague could have had other legal reasons for rejecting the proposal. There can be a professional dispute about this. But before the court begins to explain who caused the delay, when the file was handed over and with what supposed priority the experts are working, it must have one elementary duty: to know what is actually in the file.

Because the court file is not a decoration.

And the corrective resolution should not be a basket into which everything that failed in the first decision is thrown after public notice.

If the judiciary begins to consider it normal that factually significant statements first appear in a decision and simply disappear as a "correction" after notice, it is no longer just a few erroneous sentences. It is an erosion of trust in the very mechanism of judicial decision-making.

And when such decisions involve children and family relationships, the result is not just damaged paper.

Meanwhile, time is running out. Children are growing. Relationships change. And human life will not retroactively rewrite any corrective resolution.

Source:

1. Resolution of 9 June 2026, file no. stamp 30 Cdo 921/2026, no. 30 Cdo 921/2026-277,The Supreme Court emphasizes here that Section 164 of the Civil Code serves to correct formal and mechanical errors, not to additionally revise the argumentative basis of the decision.Text of decision 30 Cdo 921/2026

2. Finding of 10/04/2012, file no. stamp II. ÚS 1456/11, N 75/65 SbNU 51.The Constitutional Court defined correction according to § 164 of the Civil Code as a tool for technical and obvious errors and rejected its use to rewrite entire parts of the justification or change their meaning.Finding II. ÚS 1456/11 in the NALUS database

3. Act No. 6/2002 Coll., on courts and judges, § 174a.Prague: Collection of Laws of the Czech Republic. The provision regulates the proposal to determine the deadline for the execution of the procedural act; according to § 174a, paragraph 9, no remedies are admissible against a decision on such a proposal. This conclusion is also confirmed by the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.Act No. 6/2002 Coll. – information from the Chamber of Deputies