On a working morning in Prague’s New Town, the most consequential anti-corruption tool in the country is also the dullest thing on the screen: a government website at smlouvy.gov.cz, the national registr smluv — “register of contracts” — rendered in the flat blue of state IT everywhere. Type in the name of a city department, a hospital, a transport company, and the contracts appear as scanned text, line items, signatures. There is no application to fill in, no fee, no reason given required. The premise of the page is quietly radical, and it is written into Czech law: a public contract that is not posted here does not legally exist.
That premise — publish or the deal is void — is the spine of the story Prague tells about itself in the governance debates of the 2020s. It is also a story with a sharp edge, because the city that helped popularise radical procurement transparency is the same city that, in the summer of 2022, watched a corruption scandal detonate inside one of its own companies. Both things are true, and the more useful version of Prague’s governance decade is the one that holds them together.
The law that makes a contract disappear
The mechanism is the zákon o registru smluv, Act No. 340/2015, in force since mid-2016. It requires that public bodies — ministries, municipalities, state-owned companies, and a long list of other obliged entities — publish their contracts in the central register. The threshold is low by design: contracts whose value exceeds 50,000 koruna, roughly two thousand euros, must be posted. Genuinely sensitive content can be redacted, but the document itself goes up.
The teeth are in the sanction. A contract that should have been published but is not posted within three months of signing becomes null and void ex tunc — void from the beginning, as if it had never been agreed. Since July 2017, an in-scope contract takes effect only on the day it appears in the register. The point is to remove the comfortable middle ground in which a deal could be done quietly and disclosed, if at all, much later. Here, secrecy and enforceability are made mutually exclusive. A supplier who wants to be paid has a direct, self-interested reason to insist the contract is public.
This sits on top of, rather than replacing, the ordinary architecture of European procurement. The Czech Public Procurement Act, Act No. 134/2016, transposes the EU’s 2014 procurement directive and binds contracting authorities to the familiar principles — transparency, equal treatment, non-discrimination, proportionality — with tenders run through the national electronic system. The register of contracts is the Czech addition: a downstream disclosure rule that makes the paperwork of the whole system visible after the fact, to anyone, for nothing.
The watchdog in Brno
Enforcement of the tendering rules themselves runs through a single institution with an unglamorous name and a long reach: the Úřad pro ochranu hospodářské soutěže, the Office for the Protection of Competition, known by its initials ÚOHS and based not in Prague but in Brno. The office is the country’s competition authority, and since the mid-2000s it has also been the supervisory body for public procurement — the place where a losing bidder, or a watchdog, files a challenge alleging that a tender was rigged, steered, or improperly cancelled. Its president is appointed for a fixed term, a structural attempt to keep the referee at arm’s length from the players.
None of this came from nowhere. The register and the procurement law are reform-era instruments, built in a country with a real and well-documented history of procurement-corruption concern through the 2000s and 2010s. The transparency apparatus is, in large part, a response to that history rather than a denial of it.
A contract that is not published within three months of signing becomes null and void from the beginning — as if it had never been agreed.
Act No. 340/2015, on the Register of Contracts
What Prague added on top
If the register is the national floor, Prague spent the years after 2018 trying to build above it. The municipal coalition that took City Hall after that year’s election was led by Zdeněk Hřib of the Czech Pirate Party — reportedly the first Pirate to run a capital city anywhere — on a platform that put transparency and open government near the centre. The pitch was a city hall whose accounts, invoices and decisions were open by default, partly as an explicit attack on the patronage culture the Pirates called trafiky, the soft jobs handed out as political favours.
The most durable product of that period is data infrastructure rather than rhetoric. Prague’s municipal technology company, Operátor ICT, built and runs the city data platform Golemio and the open-data catalogue at opendata.praha.eu, and — notably — published the platform’s source code openly, so other administrations could reuse it. The European Commission’s interoperability portal has held Golemio up as a case study in municipal open data. It is unglamorous plumbing, but it is the kind of plumbing that makes a city’s spending legible to people outside the building.
The scandal the transparency did not prevent
And then, in June 2022, the limits of the whole edifice arrived in the form of a police raid. The operation, codenamed Dozimetr — “dosimeter” — centred on the Dopravní podnik hlavního města Prahy, the city’s public transport company, universally abbreviated DPP. After a lengthy surveillance phase, investigators searched City Hall, the transport company’s offices and dozens of other locations, and arrested most of the people they charged.
The prosecution’s account, as reported, described an organised group that had worked to install loyal managers in key posts at DPP so they could influence tenders and extract bribes from the companies that won them. Among those charged was a sitting deputy mayor of Prague, from the Mayors and Independents party rather than the Pirates; the fallout reached national politics and prompted a government minister’s resignation. City-commissioned audits subsequently pointed to overpriced contracts and wasteful spending at the company. The case has since moved through the courts, and the presumption of innocence applies to the defendants until any final judgment.
Dozimetr is the part of the story that resists a tidy moral. Prague had the register, the open-data portal, the procurement law and the Brno watchdog — and corruption allegedly flourished anyway, inside a city-owned company, in the years those tools were operating. The honest reading is not that transparency failed but that transparency is necessary and insufficient at the same time. A published contract reveals the price and the parties; it does not, on its own, reveal that the manager who signed it was installed to be pliable. Disclosure makes capture harder to sustain over time. It does not make it impossible in the moment.
Why the model still travels
What survives the scandal is the durability of the underlying idea, and that is the genuinely exportable thing. The publish-or-void rule is unusually clean for an anti-corruption instrument: it does not depend on a regulator noticing, a journalist digging, or a whistleblower coming forward. It changes the default. A contract is dark until someone acts, almost everywhere in Europe; in the Czech model, an in-scope contract is void until someone publishes it. That inversion is what civil-society analysts and open-contracting advocates have found most worth studying.
It is worth resisting the temptation to crown the Czech approach the single “most stringent” regime in central Europe; neighbouring Slovakia runs its own central register of contracts with comparable void-for-non-publication logic, and several governments have moved towards open-contracting standards. The Czech register is best understood as one of the early, full-blooded versions of a broader European turn rather than a solitary peak.
Back at the screen in the New Town, the register keeps doing its undramatic work: contracts arriving, becoming effective on publication, sitting there to be read. The Dozimetr courtroom is a few tram stops away, a reminder of what the screen cannot catch. Prague’s governance decade is the argument between those two rooms — the open file and the closed deal — and the city’s contribution to the European urban conversation is not that it won that argument, but that it wrote the open file into law and dared anyone to close it again.
Sources: Act No. 340/2015 Coll. (zákon o registru smluv) and the register at smlouvy.gov.cz; Act No. 134/2016 Coll. on Public Procurement, transposing EU Directive 2014/24/EU; the Office for the Protection of Competition (ÚOHS / Úřad pro ochranu hospodářské soutěže); City of Prague and Operátor ICT (Golemio data platform, opendata.praha.eu); European Commission Interoperable Europe / Open Source Observatory; public reporting on the 2022 Operation Dozimetr investigation into the Prague transport company (Dopravní podnik, DPP); Open Contracting Partnership analysis of Czech procurement; Transparency International country materials on the Czech Republic.
