Miroslav Kusý

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Miroslav Kusý (born 1 December 1931, Bratislava) is a Slovak political scientist and former politician.

Miroslav Kusý graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of Charles University of Prague in 1954 and in 1956 he completed his post-graduate scientific research there.

Then he moved to Bratislava, to the Faculty of Philosophy of Comenius University. He acted there as an assistant lecturer, associate professor and from 1967 to 1970 as a professor for marxist philosophy. Since 1968 to 1969 he was a member of Central Committee of Communist Party of Slovakia. He acted as the leader of the ideological department, the main brainwashing institution in Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

He was dismissed from the Communist party during the purges following the ascend of Normalization era and worked as a library clerk at the University he was previously teaching at.

In 1977 he was one of the three signatories of the Charta 77 document, which demanded that the Communist government abide by the international human rights covenants that it ratified. He was released from the University altogether and worked as a manual worker for many years, undergoing housechecks and frequent stays in detention cell. He joined the community of writers around Edice Petlice established by Ludvík Vaculík and Edice Expedice of the playwright and later the first democratic president Václav Havel. In 1989 he spent ten weeks in prison awaiting trial for the 'treason and subversion of the Republic', being released just before the Velvet Revolution in November 1989.

After that, Miroslav Kusý served as the Minister of Information in the so-called "Government of National Reconciliation" of Czechoslovakia, the Rector of the Comenius University, and the Deputy of the (Czechoslovak) Presidential Office for Slovakia.

He is the founder of the Slovak Helsinki Committee for human rights, Milan Šimečka Foundation, and he acts as a UNESCO Chair for Human Rights in Slovakia. He is on the board of directors of multiple human rights organizations and teaches human rights courses at the Comenius University. He writes weekly columns for the daily SME and is the author of 11 books.