Former Prime Minister Vladimir Mečiar will not be prosecuted for granting an amnesty in the case of the abduction of the former president's son, according to TV Markiza. It has been reported that a Bratislava police investigator made the decision as the act is not a criminal offense and thus there is no reason to advance the matter. In 1998, Vladimír Mečiar, Prime Minister and acting president at the time, stopped investigations into two criminal cases through the issuing of amnesties. The cases involved the kidnapping of the son of the former president Michal Kováč, a thwarted referendum, and the murder in 1996 of police officer Robert Remiáš, who served as a contact for a key witness of the abduction.
As some deemed the overturning of the amnesties unconstitutional, the Constitutional Court had the final say and decided to overturn them in May 2017. With the amnesties now overturned, the halted criminal investigations into the case could commence. The former prime minister will elude prosecution even though the Constitutional Court has declared that he indeed acted beyond the scope of his powers by issuing the amnesties. In the summer of 2017, an investigation shelved the case because the statute of limitation had expired. At the end of October in that year, the Bratislava criminal police began to deal with the case after the Prosecutor General's Office, on the initiative of MP Ondrej Dostal, stated that the original resolution of the investigator was premature.
Meanwhile Mečiar, whose previous party the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) disappeared from politics in 2014, is busy preparing for a come back to the political arena, the pluska website reported on Friday. In an interview for the website, the three-time former premier Mečiar claimed that his new party would be "interesting also programme-wise, but most importantly different from all the other parties". The former premier claimed that the party already boasted enough leaders, all of whom are household names. He didn't rule out that one of the leaders could be ex-justice minister and judge Stefan Harabin. He claimed that he has not met with Harabin, though. "Personal contact is senseless and, at any rate, it would make everyone suspicious. But when the right time comes, we'll be standing side by side," he said.
