crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
and psychologists (just to name a few of the potentially relevant disciplines here.) However, no criterion
of validation can be applied without proper access to the sources of information. Therefore, at best,
lawyers should aspire to create such legal frameworks which assist in meaningfully preserving the
source and form of this information, and do not prevent access to (and, thus, a better understanding of)
the record on even the most regrettable and traumatic segments of the past.
Regrettably – with the notable exception of Germany – access to the files generated by numerous
actors of the Communist regimes, or even only to the files of the Communist secret services, has not
been on the top of the agenda of the new regimes. In the early years the emphasis was on lustration or decommunization,
i.e. on excluding the echelons of the former oppressive regime from the governmental
elite of the new one. Lustration laws were typically focusing on exposing the agents and – more
dubiously – the collaborators of the Communist secret services, without paying much attention to where
and from whom the information of collaboration came from. The weaknesses of lustration laws became
readily apparent in most countries which adopted them. Constitutional courts typically could not stop
the political steamroller of de-communization. The rule of law was made to yield again to temporary
measures of exception.
It has become normal for former collaborators of the Communist secret services to pass lustration
procedures only to be exposed in the press by political opponents at a convenient subsequent date.
Lustration procedures were also extended and redesigned according to the momentary political needs of
the ruling political powers of the day. The most notorious recent lustration attempt is the former Polish
government’s move to expand the scope of the lustration law, well beyond the reach of the previous law,
and beyond the stricto sensu political sphere. Former Polish prime ministers 13 refused to adhere to the
reinvented procedure as they found it humiliating. When the Polish Constitutional Tribunal declared the
new law unconstitutional, Chief Justice Jerzy Stepien stated that “a state based on the rule of law should
not fulfil a craving for revenge instead of fulfilling justice”. 14
An imagined alternative to lustration, the so-called “agent lists” have for a long time been a center
of popular fascination. The most recent wave of exposure in Slovakia 15 , Poland 16 or Hungary 17 had
a much broader audience than in previous cases due to the publicity potentials of the World Wide
Web. What distinguished the Slovak example from the others is that in Slovakia, publishing the data
of communist secret police agents and collaborators is part of the normal operations of the National
Institute of Memory (Ústav Pamati Národa), while in the other countries, the lists emerged as a result
of uninvited private contributions – attracting unusual interest and stirring considerable animosity in
the public sphere. 18 The Slovak solution in its current form does contribute to setting the record straight
and – directly and indirectly – to a better understanding of the past. While the emerging agent lists in
early 2005 also prompted several actors on the Hungarian scene to assemble a more reliable record on
the agents and prominent collaborators of the Communist secret services, 19 it is crucial to see the most
important difference between the Slovak and the Hungarian case. Imagining that the same amount and
13
Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz both refused to sign the statements required by the new law, claiming that the aim of the new procedure
was simply to humiliate others. See http://www.polskieradio.pl/zagranica/news/artykul51621.html (April 26, 2007). Mazowiecki’s refusal
followed Bronislaw Geremek’s speech in the European Parliament.
14
Quoted in English from “Poland’s anti-communist law ‘unconstitutional’”, The Daily Telegraph, May 12 (2007), http://www.telegraph.
co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/12/wpoland12.xml. See also Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Resolution
1096 (1996) on measures to dismantle the heritage of former communist totalitarian systems at para 12, emphasizing that “Revenge
may never be a goal of such measures, nor should political or social misuse of the resulting lustration process be allowed. The aim of
lustration is not to punish people presumed guilty – this is the task of prosecutors using criminal law – but to protect the newly emerged
democracy.” As available at http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/AdoptedText/TA96/ERES1096.HTM.
15
The Slovak Institute of National Remembrance started publishing the files of secret service collaborators in 2004. In the case of Slovakia,
the situation is further complicated because of the Czechoslovak heritage of the services.
16
See in 2005, the Wildstein list, published by journalist Bronislaw Wildstein (then working for Rzeczpospolita) of 240,00 names – http://
www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1480985,00.html.
17
In early 2005 a so-called agent list was posted (including 219 names and a signature ‘Expert 90’) on the website angelfire.com (http://
www.angelfire.com/zine2/szakerto90/). The list appeared in the aftermath of the scandal in the autumn of 2004, in which it was revealed
that Péter Medgyessy, the freshly elected Prime Minister of the Hungarian Socialist Party had been a counter-intelligence agent. The news
were shocking mostly because PM Medgyessy safely obtained a lustration clearance before.
18
The English language website of the Institute is accessible at http://www.upn.gov.sk/v2/index.php?page=about-nations-memory-institute.
19
At the peek of the scandal in early 2005 (mentioned at note 18, above), the Hungarian weekly Heti Világgazdaság posted its
comprehensive and critical ‘agent dossier’ at http://hvg.hu/ugynok.aspx (in Hungarian). In the academic community the effort was
pioneered by the historians of the 1956 Institute. See their Hungarian language portal at http://www.rev.hu/rev/html/hu/ugynok/_ugynok.
html.
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