Czechs urged to repeal law denying rights to Kindertransport descendants

The law prevents descendants of Jewish refugees who escaped Czechoslovakia during Nazi occupation via pre-second world war ‘Kindertransport’ (such as this pictured vessel, which rescued Jewish children from Nazi Germany) from gaining Czech citizenship. Photograph: Fred Morley/Getty Images

The Czech government is coming under pressure to amend a communist-era rule that denies citizenship rights to descendants of Jewish refugee children who fled to Britain from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on pre-second world war Kindertransports.

A law passed after the communists seized power in 1948 aimed to punish defectors who fled the dictatorship for the capitalist west by stripping them and any children they had afterwards of the right to citizenship, unless registered at a Czechoslovak embassy within a year of their birth.