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The president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, has appealed to the country’s Constitutional court amid a dispute over his participation in the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara.
Pavel, who served in the Czech armed forces for more than three decades, took office in March 2023 and has attended every NATO summit since then.
But Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš announced on Monday that Pavel would not be included in a delegation travelling to Turkey in July, with only the PM and defence and foreign ministers set to go.
Babiš, the leader of the right-wing populist ANO party, returned to power last year, and has carved out a confrontational relationship with Pavel. However, he dismissed the idea that his government was “acting against” the president or “forbidding him from doing something”. He said the reasoning was “purely practical” and that the government would have to defend its low defence spending and lay out its budget plans at the two-day event.
In response, Pavel issued a video statement on Tuesday, in which he said he had filed a competency lawsuit to “clarify the powers of the president and the government” when representing the country abroad.
“In this lawsuit, I ask the Constitutional Court to declare who can decide on the president’s participation in the summit,” he said.
The 2026 NATO summit is set to be held on the 7 and 8 July at the Beştepe Presidential Compound in the Turkish capital.
NATO members committed at the Hague Summit last year to investing 5% of GDP annually on core defence and wider defence-and security-related areas by 2035.
Speaking in Brussels last week, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that while many countries had followed through, some “still need to do more”.
“We will be candid about that both in private and in public,” he told reporters.