<P> Under the current European regulations, citizens of either country are entitled to the diplomatic protection of any other EU country and, therefore, the Czech and Slovak Republics have been considering merging their embassies together with nations of the Visegrád Group in order to reduce costs . </P> <P> One of the problems not solved during dissolution was the question of a large number of Romani living in the Czech Republic, who were born and officially registered in today's Slovakia . Most of them did not re-register their official place of stay during the months before dissolution, and so the question of their citizenship was left open . The 1992 Czech Nationality Act allowed a grant of automatic citizenship only to those born on Czech territory . For others, the right to citizenship required proof of a five - year period of residence, an "unobjectionable" criminal record, significant fees and a complicated bureaucratic process; this reportedly excluded a rather large percentage of Roma . </P> <P> The Slovak government did not want to grant citizenship to non-residents . Significant numbers of Roma living in Czech orphanages did not have their legal status clarified, and were released from care as adult non-citizens without any right to work or live in the Czech Republic . Under pressure from the European Union, the Czech government made amendments to its nationality law in 1999 and 2003 which effectively solved the problem; however, compensation has not been provided to those rendered stateless in 1992 . </P> <P> In the former Czechoslovakia, the first television channel was a federal one and the Czech and Slovak languages were used in equal ratios in the TV news there, although foreign films and TV series were almost exclusively dubbed into Czech, for example . This (and the fact that the languages are very similar) made almost all people of both nations passively bilingual, i.e., they were able to understand but not necessarily speak the other language . After the dissolution in 1990s the new TV channels in the Czech Republic practically stopped using Slovak, and young Czech people now have a much lower understanding of the Slovak language . Also, the number of Slovak - language books and newspapers sold in the Czech Republic dropped drastically . The Czech TV news, however, started to reintroduce Slovak - language coverage from Slovakia and Slovak TV (STV2) rebroadcasts the Czech TV newscast Události ČT daily, ten minutes after midnight . </P>

This country is one of the two created from the breakup of czechoslovakia in 1993