A Sri Lankan man who arrived in Prague late last year to seek asylum and dignified life, has ended in a Czech prison instead, sentenced for abusing other person’s passport, daily Hospodarske Noviny (HN) reported on Monday.

The man, 28-year-old V.M., whose name the reporters know but respect his request for anonymity, is a Tamil who faced the government troops’ violence in Sri Lanka, the daily writes.

However, he was wrong when he expected his suffering to be over in Prague. The Czech police arrested him, he was convicted and is still staying in the Prague-Pankrac prison, HN writes.

“He was punished for having arrived using a passport of another man, an Indian. He also used a forged Schengen entry stamp. However, from the beginning he has made it clear that he is a refugee and wants to apply for asylum,” V.M.’s lawyer Eva Hola is quoted as saying.

According to lawyers, it is extremely tough to imprison a man for using another person’s passport and having a single faked stamp, mainly if he is a refugee who most probably experienced torture in his homeland, HN writes.

“A prison sentence is definitely inappropriate in this case. We dealt with a similar case in the past, when a Sri Lankan man was only sentenced to three months, a period identical with the time he spent in custody before the trial,” Hola said.

The judge, in her verdict, said V.M. forged his documents with a clear intention to reach France. “In this context, his assertion about his alleged persecution looks very untrustworthy. If he really had faced persecution, he would have presented his genuine identity at the Czech customs checks,” the judge said.

-Praguemonitor
-Agencies