Former foreign minister and honorary
chairman of the center-right Top 09 party, Karel Schwarzenberg,
has died at the age of 85. This was announced on X by former
Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek, explaining that
Schwarzenberg died in a Vienna hospital, where he had been
admitted last week. A close friend of former President Vaclav
Havel, Schwarzenberg was one of the most important figures in
post-Soviet Czech politics. Born in Prague in 1937 to a noble
family forced to flee the country after the 1948 Communist coup
by settling in Vienna, Schwarzenberg served as president of the
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights in the 1980s,
working on human rights issues in the former USSR in Bulgaria,
Kosovo and Czechoslovakia. He also co-founded the Czechoslovak
Documentary Center in support of Czechoslovak exile and dissent,
which was based in his family villa in Bavaria. After his return
to then-Czechoslovakia in 1989, Schwarzenberg served as
chancellor to President Vaclav Havel. He was then elected
senator from 2004 to 2010 and served as foreign minister of the
Czech Republic from 2007 to 2009 and again from 2010 to 2013. In
2009 Schwarzenberg founded, together with Kalousek, the Top 09
party, and in 2010 he was elected an MP. In the 2013
presidential election he lost in the runoff to Milos Zeman.
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