"At the very beginning it was the career of President Dr Edvard Beneš. My father had some of his writings at home from the war. And I became interested from the age of ten or so. I was always interested in politics. There were two writings, Destroy Austria-Hungary, that was written sometime in 1915, and Problems of New Europe and the Foreign Policy of Czechoslovakia, that was written by Beneš as foreign minister. Then in 1946 he published a memoir. I read that too, I studied it, I was very interested in it. And besides, which was a coincidence, of course, in May and June 1945, my father was for a short time the head of the outer castle guard of President Beneš, so he sometimes accompanied him on his private outings. And so it happened that I got to go on one of those walks. I didn't give up, I greeted Beneš. I said, 'Mr. President, I'm reading your books.' And he was surprised, but then my father called me. He came over and apologized, so I had to leave. So I didn't even tell him which books they were. But he influenced me a lot with his person and the way he worked. So I just made up my mind that I was going to go to law school too. Of course, knowing his life, I had the idea that it might be similar to his case: he had studied not only in Prague, but also in France, in Dijon, in London and in Berlin. That was out of the question in Czechoslovakia at that time. But nevertheless I said to myself that I would go to law school and see what I would be able to achieve in this profession. And in the end that was actually the maximum. Because - if you don't count pure academics - there is actually no higher, more prestigious profession in law than that of a Constitutional Court judge."
"Yes, it was the North Bohemian organisation of the KAN [Club of Committed Non-Partisans] Ústí nad Labem. That's right. Originally two KANs were formed there independently, then they merged. I got quite a lot of exposure there, and when the Soviet occupation came, or the occupation of the Warsaw Pact countries, the KAN leadership met and thought about what to do next. At that time we were getting such often contradictory messages. There was one report that - allegedly, which was not proven - according to Czechoslovak Radio, the entire leadership of the North Bohemian KAN was lying in a mass grave somewhere near Pribram. We looked at each other, we knew that this was not true, but it didn't seem like much of a prospect. So basically we agreed that we would try to emigrate at least until the situation here was sorted out in terms of personal safety."
"Those first runs of the PŠP [Workers' Law School] came in 1949/1950. But then, I would say, it was much more trivial from a legal and social point of view. There were cases that they spent three months at that PŠP [Workers' Law School] and then went on to graduate as Doctor of Laws! Well, that was crazy. Later on, in my time, it was the late fifties and early sixties, it was more serious, after all, in quotation marks, because they were a year or two at that PŠP [Workers' Law School], they got a sort of basic training there, then they went to work for a while as a sort of quasi-waiting judge. Then they were appointed or elected as judges, but the condition was that they had to complete a distance learning law degree while working in the court. They usually did. As far as I remember, in the area of Hradec Králové, Ústí nad Labem, about two failed to do so. They were then placed in some decent paying, though not strictly legal jobs. So those were the so-called State Security officers. Some of them had natural intelligence and a sense of justice. I knew a few who remained judges even after 1989 and judged well."
Former Constitutional Court Judge Vojen Güttler was born on 19 August 1934 in Prague to a Czechoslovak army officer. He spent the first years of his life in Liberec, but during the Second World War the family moved to Turnov. During the Protectorate, his father participated in resistance activities in the Defence of the Nation organisation. He was arrested and imprisoned, but the Nazis only proved his so-called anti-German speech. Soon after the communist coup, in March 1948, my father was discharged from the army and worked for several years as a civilian employee in the uranium mines in the Jáchymov region, which took its toll on his health and he died at the age of 61. Vojen Güttler had admired President Edvard Beneš since childhood and, like him, longed to study law. However, after graduating from the Jičín Gymnasium, he was not recommended to study at the law school. He began to study agricultural engineering, then worked for a few months, like his father, in the uranium mines in the Jáchymov region, where he finally received a recommendation to study law. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Charles University in 1953-1958. After graduation, he first worked as a corporate lawyer at the Litomyšl-based Vertex company, then as a judge at the district court in Rychnov nad Kněžnou. In the 1960s he became a judge at the district and then regional court in Ústí nad Labem. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops, he went into exile for a short period of time out of concern for his personal safety, returning at the end of 1968. After the vetting at the beginning of normalisation he could no longer work in the judiciary, he worked as a corporate lawyer at TOS Hostivař. At the same time, he participated in the activities of the labour commissions of the Federal Ministry of General Engineering and the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, and in 1988 he also worked on the drafting of an amendment to the Labour Code. At the beginning of 1990 he participated in the renewal of KAN. The new Minister of Justice, Dagmar Burešová, invited him to the Ministry, where he worked on compensation for political prisoners of the communist regime. In the autumn of 1990 he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Prague. In 1992, he became a judge of the Constitutional Court of the Czechoslovak Republic, and after the dissolution of the federation, he was a judge of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic for two terms (1993 to 2003 and 2003 to 2013). He was involved in the Constitutional Court’s decisions on the Lustration Act, the Beneš Decrees, the Lisbon Treaty and the Church Restitution Act, among others. After the end of his second term, he started working for the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences, where he deals with legal aspects of artificial intelligence, biometric data, as well as freedom of speech and its limitations. He received the 2017 Lawyer of the Year award.
