Václav Vaško was a Czech diplomat, human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 activist, author of books dealing with the history of the Catholic Church during the Soviet occupation and communist dictatorship, and a former political prisoner

Political prisoner

According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....

 of the communist regime.

He was awarded the Medal of Merit by President Václav Havel

Václav Havel

Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...

 on 28 October 1998. He was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism

Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism

The Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism , which was signed on 3 June 2008, was a declaration signed by prominent European politicians, former political prisoners and historians, including past signatories of Charter 77 such as Václav Havel, which called for condemnation of and...

.

Works

• Neumlčená (a chronicle of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia during the communist dictatorship, written in the 1980s, published in 1990 in two volumes)
• Kardinál Tomášek (1994, co-authored with Jan Hartmann, Bohumil Svoboda et al.)
• Ne vším jsem byl rád (1999, 2001)
• Dům na skále
  • Církev zkoušená (2004)
  • Církev bojující (2007)
  • Církev vězněná (2008)
• Likvidace řeckokatolické církve (2007)