The Czech Republic debates artistic freedom—again.

In April 2007, Czech artist David Hons replaced the human silhouettes in 48 Prague crosswalk signals with figures engaged in decidedly less pedestrian activities. One signal depicted a man urinating; another had a bottle raised to his mouth. A man squatted to defecate; another appeared to be falling down drunk. “I wanted to show people, they don’t have to walk or stand when the system says so,” Hons wrote on his website.

A Prague municipal court found Hons guilty of vandalism, fined him $3,750, and ordered that he come up with an additional $5,000 to repair the signals. Hons paid for the repairs but refused the fine, explaining that he was merely expressing himself. Last December, he was sentenced to a month in jail. “I feel that paying the fine would be similar to signing an agreement to collaborate with the [secret police] in the era of totalitarianism,” the 37-year-old artist wrote in a statement published in the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny shortly before he entered prison.

Hons isn’t the only dissatisfied Czech citizen who has recently made his frustration public. In May 2010, as the country was preparing for a nationwide election, Roman Smetana, a 29-year-old bus driver from the city of Olomouc, defaced some 30 campaign posters, scrawling, “Liars,” “Idiots,” “Corruptioneers,” and “Prostitutes” across them in Magic Marker. After the election, the victorious center-right Civic Democrats took legal action. Smetana was found guilty of vandalizing private property, fined $800, and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. He complied with the fine (to avoid debt collectors) but resisted the second half of the punishment. His graffiti, he told the court, “was the free expression of opinion by a citizen who, unlike political parties, does not have huge funds for publicity at his disposal.” For refusing the community service, he was sentenced to 100 days in jail. Yet this month, Smetana refused to show up at the prison to begin his sentence; he could now spend three years behind bars for defying the court’s orders.

The convictions of Hons and Smetana have struck a chord in the country. Earlier this month, the Czech National Theater hosted a discussion about the two cases, which, the theater says, have reignited the “lasting dispute about the extent to which the state has the power to correct interventions in the public space.” Facebook campaigns have been organized in defense of both men, and an Internet petition in support of Smetana, citing the country’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, has gathered 3,800 signatures. Immediately after Hons was imprisoned, anonymous pranksters across the country painted over the heads of pedestrian signal silhouettes as a sign of solidarity with the artist. Meanwhile, the Czech Helsinki Committee, a NGO that monitors human rights, has expressed disapproval of both prosecutions. “We do not consider it correct,” the organization said in a statement, “to criminalize the critical expressions of citizens or the independent expressions of artists.”

ARTISTIC DEMONSTRATIONS of discontent have a storied history in Czech politics. The psychedelic rock group Plastic People of the Universe was widely seen as subverting Communist rule with their music, and their 1976 trial—for “organized disturbance of the peace”—inspired Vaclav Havel and a small group of dissidents to draft Charter 77, the civic initiative insisting that the Czechoslovak Communist regime respect basic human rights.