Slovak president says she’ll challenge new government’s plan to close top prosecutors office

Slovakia’s President Zuzana Caputova says she will seek to block the new government’s plan to return the prosecution of major crimes from a national office to regional ones, using either a veto or a constitutional challenge. But the governing coalition could likely override any veto. The government of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico plans to change the penal code to abolish the special prosecutors office that handles serious crimes such as graft and organized crime by mid-January, and return those prosecutions to regional offices, which have not dealt with such crimes for 20 years. Caputova says she thinks the planned changes go against the rule of law