Is Tomas Halik, a Catholic priest and a political dissident close to the late Czech President Vaclav Havel, the father of Vera Jourova, the vice-president of the European Commission? No, that's not true: There are no records linking the two people who have held public office and been subject to public scrutiny for years, and the claim offers no supporting evidence.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on November 5, 2023, with an unidentified man reading a list of former Czech dissidents, politicians and other high-profile Czechs whom he alleges served as agents of the communist-era secret police, the STB. That claim is beyond the scope of this fact check, which is focused on the man saying that Tomas Halik is Jourova's father (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff):
Tomas Halik, an interesting name. He is the father of EU Commissioner Jourova. Well, it is visible. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Nov 9 08:19:37 2023 UTC)
Vera Jourova, whose maiden name is Spakova, was born in 1964 in Trebic, a Czech town about 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) east of Prague. She described her childhood in a memoir, published in 2013, "The Way Out of Panopticon," when she became one of the prominent figures of the ANO political movement. There are no reports quoting from it or reviews of the book that mention Tomas Halik or the claim that he was her father. Based on a Google search for "Jourová and Halík" (archived here) a iDnes.cz article reported in 2014 that Jourova expressed her support for Halik's possible presidential candidacy. She became an European Union commissioner in 2014 and currently serves as the European Commission vice-president.
Halik, a Catholic priest and philosopher, was born in Prague in 1948. He was considered a political dissident during Communist rule, was a friend of Vaclav Havel, the late Czech president, and was mentioned among possible presidential candidates several times including 2002 and 2016. There is no evidence to suggest he fathered Jourova when he was 16 years old.
