We were alarmed allegations have been made that Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the British Labour Party, was a confidant of the State Security of the communist Czechoslovakia. We were prosecuted by State Security because of our work for Charter 77 ourselves. We have learned about their methods from our own experience, and from the experience of our relatives and colleagues.

We thought the times when State Security could influence the lives of people in Czechoslovakia had ended in 1989. We consider it unacceptable that it could still influence the political situation even in other countries.

The claims by a former officer of the Czechoslovak State Security service, who operated in the 1980s in London with a diplomatic cover, underlined the dangers of uncritically accepting information given about its activities.

The credibility of this information was refuted by the director of the Czech Archive Světlana Ptáčníková. It was also exposed as apparently false by a leading Czech expert of that era Radek Schovánek. Their explanations are based on rock-solid evidence that excludes any possibility that the accusations against Jeremy Corbyn could be true.