I mina Pragbrev under hösten 2006 fann jag ofta anledning att återkomma till min lärare i konstitutionell rätt, Vojtech Cepl. Men hans personlighet och levnadsöde är så fascinerande att det är värt att berättas utförligare om. Innan jag lämnade Prag gjorde jag därför en intervju med honom:
‘I was 15 years too early and had to rot in Prague for almost 20’He was registered as an enemy of the state, but within a short period of time he had been assigned to write its new constitution. Alex Ljungvall met Czech law professor Vojtech Cepl for a talk about life and career under Communism – and how all of a sudden a miracle came to happen.The end of the summer semester is approaching and Vojtech Cepl spends his days examining students. The rumour, however, has it that he does not so much examine his students as tell them: ‘Go West! Go West!’
True or not, the rumour says a good deal about this 69-year old law professor, whose impressive scholarly wisdom, strong views and pro-Americanism, all combined with a disarmingly subtle humour, are impossible to stay indifferent to.
Professor Cepl receives me at his home in the Vinohrady district of Prague. He has a day off from his professorial duties, so he has plenty of time for sharing his memories of an eventful past.
Since 2003 Vojtech Cepl is back at the Faculty of Law at Charles University in Prague after having, as he puts it, ‘served a 10-year sentence at the Czech Constitutional Court in Brno’. Being appointed judge of the Constitutional Court nonetheless marked the culmination of his legal career.
It had all started much earlier, in a very different time. In the 1950’s young Vojtech began his studies at the law faculty, a somewhat gloomy building right by the Vltava river, which during the war had been shut down to serve as headquarters for the Nazi-German SS.
Being raised in an intellectually oriented neighbourhood and spending much time discussing politics and philosophy with his friends, Vojtech dreamt of studying sociology. In communist Czechoslovakia sociology was, however, considered bourgeois and decadent – for understanding society Marxism-Leninism was regarded as sufficient. So for Vojtech, studying law became a substitute for sociology.
As the son of a state farms and forests company director, thus belonging to the bourgeoisie, entry to law school should normally have been closed for Vojtech. But after the communist take-over in 1948, his father had been forced into manual labour, and when Vojtech was still in his teens, his father died.
– So when I applied to law school, I was registered both as a son of a worker and an orphan. Paradoxically, for communist class origin selection it couldn’t be better.
Professor CeplAt that time, the intake was only 100 students a year. For being the only law faculty in a country of nearly 15 million people it may seem surprisingly few, but in the 1950’s the party leadership still believed in the central Marxist-Leninist thesis of the withering away of the state. In communist society – the final stage of development – societal conflicts would no longer exist and everybody would have learnt the elementary rules of social intercourse. Accordingly, there would be no more need for lawyers.
After graduation in 1961, followed by two years of mandatory military service and one of law practice, Vojtech returned to the law faculty in 1964. One main reason was the opportunity it gave to travel.
His first trip was to Holland. One of the accompanying students was Michael Bogdan, who later became a professor in Lund and a familiar name to all students of international private law.
- Bogdan was outstanding and his English was the best, Cepl remembers.
Vojtech’s next trip was to Uppsala, where he attended the course Modern Sweden. He pulls a volume out of his bookshelf and shows me a souvenir – it’s Folke Schmidt’s and Stig Strömholm’s Legal Values in Modern Sweden (1965).
The Uppsala visit was probably the most important event for his postgraduate education. Vojtech’s Swedish friend Olof Kleberg gave him the UNESCO Year Book Study Abroad which contained a list of universities offering scholarships. This information was not available in Czechoslovakia. The next two years Vojtech and his friends spent writing applications for admission to western universities. After several refusals to get a permission from the Czech Ministry of Education to travel abroad, in the fall of 1967 Vojtech went to Oxford to study sociology.
During his stay there, the ‘Prague Spring’ – ‘socialism with a human face’ – came to an abrupt end as troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia. The Soviet-led occupants established a neo-Stalinist regime and a repressive period, ‘Normalisation’, followed under which many of Vojtech’s colleagues were expelled from the faculty.
Vojtech’s great fortune during this period was in being abroad. And despite having moved on to the University of Michigan in 1969, he was nevertheless optimistic about the future of his motherland and decided to return.
– I had an article published in The Baltimore Sun, claiming that to keep up with the United States in the arms race, the Soviet Union in one or two years would have to start to liberalise and introduce free market and democracy. That was of course a great intellectual mistake: I was 15 years too early and I had to rot in Prague for almost 20.
Back in Prague, and known as a critic of the regime, it was impossible for him to rise in the faculty hierarchy. He was registered on a secret list as ‘Enemy of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’, and at the special committee evaluations of all the faculty members every two years, he was regularly close to getting fired. Towards the end of the 1970’s the pressure increased and the secret police even instituted rape allegations against him. Thinking he would have to go to jail, Vojtech seriously contemplated emigration.
During these dark ages he nonetheless enjoyed a certain protection from the communist reformers who had survived within the university bureaucracy, and he never lost his job nor was sent to prison. And even though intellectual freedom in public life was severely curtailed, he could always spend time with his many books.
– When I returned from the US in 1971, I brought a big box full of books of legal theory. I had to bribe the custom official not to open it.
– I probably have the best sociology of law library east of the Rhine. Not in number of books, but because they are so carefully selected, Cepl says with a grin.
"The Velvet Revolution", which started on November 17, 1989, brought the oppressive communist regime to an end. For Vojtech Cepl, it would mean the greatest miracle in his life and a lot of new opportunities. He founded the Civic Forum at the law faculty and was elected by striking students as the vice-dean for foreign relations.
On December 5 he was called to the Rector, who rehabilitated him as docent of civil law. At fifty years of age he had been the oldest junior assistant professor at the university. ‘Too little, too late’, was Vojtech’s succinct reply.
Though being unsuccessful for such a long time, he was now clearly on the winners’ side, and in full swing in bringing the revolution also to the inner life of the law faculty. A late December night in the dark Little Quarters of Prague, he knocked on the door to the Ministry of Education and handed over a list of ten names he wished to see rehabilitated as docents, just as he had been. The nervous Minister of Education, the leader of a small party tolerated by the communists, could do nothing but submit.
Further changes followed in rapid succession, under which some people were removed from their positions, and about fifty teachers being fired following the Soviet invasion were now asked to return to the faculty. Vojtech was appointed vice-dean of the law faculty and head of the department of civil law. Today he admits that some of his old opponents were not treated in a just way, and there are wounds yet to be healed. But things like these are probably unavoidable in a revolution, even when it’s celebrated as a velvet one, he thinks.
The law faculty building in PragueVojtech also came to play a prominent part in transforming Czechoslovak society into a democracy and a free market economy. Among other things he was a legal advisor to the then Minister of Finance, Vaclav Klaus.
For a legal scholar and a deep admirer of American constitutionalism, few tasks could, however, stand comparison with becoming a member of the government drafting committee for the new Czech constitution of 1993. And 15 years later Vojtech Cepl is practically regarded as Mr Czech Constitution. During last year’s constitutional crisis with a deadlocked parliament (the two opposing blocks had got 100 seats each in the elections), he figured constantly in the media, explaining and interpreting the constitutional difficulties.
As for the constitution itself, Cepl’s views on the importance of separation of powers and checks and balances were met with a constitutional court seated in the Moravian capital Brno.
With a powerful constitutional court in place, Vojtech’s friend President Vaclav Havel wished to fill it with a lawyer whose competence and democratic dispositions he could trust. So Vojtech spent 10 years in Brno, trying hard to reform and educate the lower court judiciary, which had been trained under Communism, to adjust to the rule of law.
For Vojtech Cepl the 1990’s were, however, not only about rebuilding Czech democracy, but also a decade of growing international recognition, not least in the United States. His numerous awards and visiting professorships at top American universities also confirmed his already very positive views of the US, which he had formed already as a young boy listening to the Voice of America radio broadcasts.
In particular he admires American universities and very much prefers the American pragmatic pedagogical philosophy to the traditional teaching at Charles University.
– Here we are trying to educate noble scholars who read, listen and contemplate. This makes no sense. What modern society needs is not noble scholars, but sophisticated professionals and skilled craftsmen. Besides, only 1 percent has the capacity to be a scholar.
A main object of his critique is the heavy focus on legal history. A reason for the archaic curriculum is the dominance of legal historians at the faculty – a consequence of the tradition from the 19th century’s national revival, he explains.
– Moreover, many of my faculty colleagues left in the early nineties for private practice. The legal historians, for whom there was no demand on the capitalist market, remained.
Straightforward words from a truly grand old man in Czech legal circles. And Vojtech’s outspoken views, whether they concern strictly legal issues or world politics, do without doubt tend to provoke his opponents. In today’s Czech Republic he’s as free to express his opinions as he wishes. Vojtech Cepl, the former ‘enemy of the state’, knows to appreciate this freedom – as well as make use of it.
Alex Ljungvall
