The Czech Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) issued a landmark judgment on 6 March 2026 that will reverberate across migration desks in Czech corporations and local authorities alike. In case 5 Azs 258/2025-14, the SAC threw out an Interior-Ministry appeal and confirmed that a Ukrainian student who had briefly left the country before Russia’s full-scale invasion still qualifies for EU-level Temporary Protection (TP). The ruling turns on two conditions written into both the EU Council’s Implementing Decision 2022/382 and the Czech “Lex Ukrajina” law: (i) an applicant must have been resident in Ukraine before 24 February 2022 and (ii) must have been displaced after that date as a result of the war. Lower-court judges had already found that short-term study abroad does not cancel a person’s “residence” in Ukraine and that even repeated departures caused by the war count as displacement. The SAC agreed, stressing that TP was designed as a **flexible, humanitarian instrument** rather than a narrow immigration filter. For employers, universities and municipalities that host some 350 000 holders of Czech TP, the decision removes uncertainty about students, cross-border commuters and others whose pre-war residence status might appear ambiguous. HR teams can now move ahead with internship extensions and contract renewals without fearing sudden loss of status for such employees. Lawyers expect the Interior Ministry to update its internal guidelines within weeks; until then, the SAC’s judgment is binding on all administrative bodies. More broadly, the verdict signals Prague’s willingness to interpret EU protection standards expansively just as the government begins talks in Brussels on a post-2027 replacement for the current TP regime. Businesses that rely on Ukrainian talent—IT outsourcers, automotive suppliers and health-care providers—gain an additional planning horizon while Czech negotiators push for a pan-European transition mechanism.
