Europe News
Czech man gets suspended sentence for reading his ex's SMS
By DPA
Aug 9, 2007, 14:31 GMT

Prague - A four-month suspended prison sentence was the punishment that a 23-year-old man in the Czech Republic received from a court for stealing his ex-girlfriend's mobile phone and plunging through her text messages, reports said Thursday.

A Czech court punished Petr Koldus the young man for 'breaking secrecy of delivered mail' after he went to his ex's house in July and made off with her mobile phone. He then read and sent to himself her text messages.

'The judge evaluated it as behaviour dangerous to society,' Mlada fronta Dnes daily cited the court's spokesman as saying.

The offender reacted with disbelief. 'I don't understand at all how the court could have given me a suspended sentence,' he told the daily.

Upon learning the news, a group of young women in a Prague cafe joked that prisons would be packed with jealous Czechs convicted for ferreting through their partners' mobile phone mail boxes.

'I think there is not a single person who has not done it, especially among women,' said a 31-year-old woman who spoke on condition of anonymity. 'If it were to be solved by community service, everything would be clean.'

Groups engaged in the fight against domestic violence welcomed the verdict.

'It is the first step for people with inclinations to violence to understand that they do not have a right to do something like this,' the newspaper cited Zdena Prokopova of Rosa domestic-violence organization as saying.

She said that checking a partner's text messages and phone calls can in some cases amount to 'a modern form of mental cruelty.'

Marriage counselor Petr Smolka also agrees with punishing people for reading their partner's SMS, if for remarkably different reasons.

'These days infidelity is often revealed because a suspicious partner reads text messages of the other. And it often uselessly disturbs the marriage,' he was quoted as saying.