REUTERS David W Cerny
PRAGUE, December 1, Reuters -- Petr Uhl, a prominent Czech journalist and human rights activist who was jailed by former communist rulers, died on Wednesday, news agency CTK reported. Uhl was a lifelong leftist but never joined the Communist Party that ruled Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989, and was respected by democratic activists of all political convictions.
He drew inspiration from the West European leftists in Paris, where he travelled often in his youth.
He set up a radical leftist youth movement in the 1960s that spoke out against the repressions following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was jailed for four years on charges of subversion.
He was one of the founders of the Charter 77 human rights movement in late 1976, along with future president Vaclav Havel, which became the main platform of peaceful opposition to the communist government.
Petr Uhl was a brave and straight forward man who did not change his stance or opinions based on the current expectations in society, according to former fellow dissident, Catholic bishop Vaclav Maly, told CTK.
The country's incoming centre-right government paid tribute to him. There was no cause of death.
Petr Uhl is commended for his courage and persistence in the fight against the communist regime, said incoming Prime Minister Petr Fiala on Twitter.
In 1979, Uhl also set up the Committee for the Defence of Unjustly Prosecuted VONS, a group that helped politically persecuted activists, for which he was jailed again for five years.
His two sentences made him one of the longest-jailed anti-communist dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.
After his release from jail in 1984, Uhl worked as a boiler stoker, but also published information about Charter 77 activities and was part of VIA, a group of dissidents in the Soviet bloc trying to provide independent news.
After the end of communist rule in 1989, Uhl became a member of parliament and head of the national news agency, CTK. He was also a government envoy for human rights.
He is survived by his wife Anna Sabatova, who was the country's first ombudswoman for human rights, and four children.