Was one of the first signatories of Charter 77, a document criticizing the Communist government of Czechoslovakia for not respecting human rights and later served as the group’s spokesman. He is also a founding member of CivicFORUM, a dissident movement that helped to overthrow the Communist government in Czechoslovakia. He was elected to the Federal Assembly where he joined the Foreign Affairs Committee and later became deputy minister of Foreign Affairs. In 2002, he was appointed Ambassador for the Czech Republic to the United States, and in 2006, became the ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United Nations. Currently Mr. Palouš is the Director of the Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at the Florida International University. The Program studies and explores the politics of human rights, the processes of democratization in societies that were once under autocratic governments, and the experiences of societies currently in transition around the world. Mr. Palouš focuses on the process of negotiation of a new bilateral treaty between the European Union and Cuba, and campaigns and advocates human rights requiring the participation of representatives of independent Cuban civil society in all the stages of this process. As a Senior Fellow at School of International and Public Affairs at FIU, he teaches classes on democratization, human rights, Europe, and the European Union.
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