George Soros in Prague

Founder of the Open Society Foundations, financier and philanthropist George Soros visited Prague in June 26 – 28, 2011. His visit was prepared by Open Society Fund Prague. Soros attended a meeting of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, an initiative his Open Society Foundations and the World Bank launched in 2005. It now includes 12 Central and Eastern European countries and during the meeting, Macedonia took over the chairmanship of the initiative from the Czech Republic.

In the Czech Republic, Soros was mainly preoccupied with the situation of its Roma community and inclusive education. The Czech government has been under international pressure recently for its failure to make sure all Roma children get a decent education. The call was prompted by the November 2007 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that ordered the Czech government to stop channeling Roma children into "special" schools on account of their ethnicity.

Soros discussed this topic with the Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas. He also visited two schools in central Prague with a high proportion of children from the Roma and other socially excluded groups, in order to investigate the state of inclusive education by himself.

See pictures from Soros´s Prague visit at our Facebook photo gallery.

 

See a short video from Soros´s visit of two Prague schools here: