The outgoing president showed mercy to small-time crooks and elderly offenders, and admonished courts for being too slow. Mr. Klaus invoked his presidential right for the first time in his decade in office and 15 years since the last amnesty by his predecessor, Václav Havel.

The president pardoned all convicts with prison terms under one year. The amnesty, which was co-signed by Petr Nečas, the prime minister, also includes people sentenced for non-violent crimes to up to two years in jail, and seniors aged at least 70 whose prison terms do not exceed three years and those aged at least 75 with terms of up to 10 years.

Czech prisons have since released 6,326 inmates, or more than one quarter of the country's jail population as of January 1st.

The usual criticism followed. Dozens of freed prisoners committed crimes within days of release and went straight back behind bars. But it was another provision, known as the Article II, that has triggered a heated debate in the media, public protests, a vote of no confidence in parliament, and two constitutional complaints.

With his amnesty, the president also stopped ongoing criminal proceedings that have lasted longer than eight years under one condition, which is that defendants face at most 10 years in jail. This category happens to include several notorious embezzlement and fraud cases that signify the wild post-communist overhaul of the economy in the 1990s, which was spearheaded by Mr Klaus.

In one case, nearly 1,100 clients paid on average 1m Czech crowns ($52,000) each for family homes they never moved in to. In another, managers of an investment fund have been prosecuted for syphoning off assets worth 1.4 billion Czech crowns, which were acquired with privatisation vouchers entrusted to the fund by thousands of fellow citizens. In another case yet, a football executive has been tried for massive credit fraud.

Defendants in 18 high-profile cases may go free, said Pavel Zeman, the supreme state attorney.  Prosecutors plan to argue in 13 of them that the accused should stay in the dock, the top state attorney in Prague, Lenka Bradáčová, told Czech Television. Whether these appeals will keep cases open is yet to be seen.

The controversial provision has been a subject to a fierce legal debate. Ladislav Jakl, a presidential aide, argued that the eight-year limit was based on verdicts by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. (The president's office would not release the names of those aides and lawyers who drafted the amnesty for the president.)

Eliška Wagnerová, a former Constitutional Court judge, said that the Strasbourg court treats cases on individual basis and would never set a time limit after which all cases are seen as too long. "The European court never encourages countries to end proceedings only because they last too long," Ms Wagnerová told Czech Television.  She compared the president's approach to using "a hammer to work on filigree".

Aleš Gerloch, a constitutional expert, told the news website aktualne.cz that mass amnesties should be used when a society reaches a crucial turning point to "signal the state's changing penal policy." He said that they should not be used to empty overflowing prisons or redress trial delays.

More importantly yet, critics slammed Mr Klaus for sounding a demoralising message in a country where large-scale white-collar crime and corruption go rarely punished.

A column on idnes.cz, a news website, compared the president's message to a memorable scene from Miloš Forman's 1967 comedy, "The Fireman's Ball", in which firefighters ponder what to do after all lottery prizes were stolen. A fireman says that the theft was unfair to those who bought lottery tickets. "They should have filled their pockets too. Those who did not steal should take it as if they did not win," argues another one.

Last year, Czech investigators, prosecutors and judges appeared to have somewhat freed themselves from political influence. Several high-profile arrests in alleged corruption cases were made. The president's amnesty is a blow to these efforts. It has raised questions whether it was intentional. Jan Machacek,  a columnist for the Respekt weekly, wrote that "the broad amnesty for thousands of people only serves as a smoke screen for pardons of serious economic offenses and abolition of their investigations".

Mr Klaus accused his critics of orchestrating a smear campaign and said that time will prove him right, once "the hot heads cool off". He told Pravo  a daily, that he was offended by suggestions that he was trying to help specific people out of their legal troubles. "I did not have a single specific person in front of my eyes when [preparing] the amnesty," he said.

Czechs tend to respect their presidents, whose office is largely ceremonial.  They hang their framed portraits in classrooms and town halls, although it is not demanded by law. Some 600 mayors, or roughly one-tenth of them, took the pictures down in protest of the amnesty and its Article II, said Michal Špendlík, the mayor of Želechovice nad Dřevnicí, a small town in the country's south-east. He described a case of two local power brokers tried for bribery. "They were stealing for a long time. When finally one judge had the guts to convict them…and now they will walk out innocent," Mr Špendlík said. "I call that a dirty trick."