crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
quality of information surfaced in both countries (a hypothesis which cannot be tested here), it still
remains to be the case that in Slovakia, transparency and truth-seeking was fostered by the state, while
in Hungary, what was achieved is still the result of defiant private action. The symbolic significance
of the willingness of the state to expose its past wrongs can hardly be underestimated in the context of
coming to terms with a past heavy with governmental wrongdoing.
As an important detail adding flavour to the current discussion, one has to recall that in the course of
the smooth transition to democracy, secret services files – which themselves are of doubtful integrity and
credibility – remained for too many years under the guardianship of the now democratic secret services.
As the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights starts to reveal, in the early lustration
procedures the files of the Communist secret police were treated by the democratic institutions (by
the national secret services as well as by the courts) as if containing national secrets of the democratic
regimes. Victims’ rights to study their own files were seriously limited by legal safeguards put in place
by the new regime in order to preserve “secrets” accumulated by its predecessor. 20
The foregoing is not to suggest that the files preserved from the archives of the former secret
services, and then transferred to national institutions of remembrance, will be useful for criminal
prosecutions (nor do I intend to suggest that the prosecution of agents or collaborators of secret services
would be conducive to coming to terms with the past in any of these democracies). Countries which
tried to use the files for criminal prosecutions saw “evidence” contained in those files “wither away” in
court. 21 It only furthers the confusion that more often than not, Communist spies are sought for crimes
against the regime, only to reveal that the relevant regime is not that easy to nail for the purposes of
criminal prosecution. 22
The files of the Communist secret services, as preserved in these archives or institutes of
remembrance, can be used for a purpose other than lustration or criminal prosecutions. These files, even
in the compromised, fragmented and often barely intelligible form in which they have been preserved,
contain important information on how the Communist regimes worked on a daily basis, on both a small
and large scale. They contain information which cannot be revealed by putting the surviving secret
service chiefs or Communist party chiefs on criminal trial. Granting meaningful access to these files is
an important and indispensable first step on the road to coming to terms with the past and – hopefully –
achieving reconciliation. Here “meaningful access” stands for (a) access not only for victims but also
to professionals of history and memory, i.e. to historians, and also psychologists and sociologists and
(b) access to more than the well-familiar sheets of paper on which line after line is covered by the black
ink of the dutiful censor acting to protect national secrets and the personal data of secret service officers
and other collaborators.
Meaningful access also entails attributing proper significance to one’s findings. The Polish
Supreme Court, for instance, acted in an exemplary fashion when – instead of mechanically taking note
of the fact of enrollment as an indicator of collaboration – it decided to take into account what exactly
a collaborator was doing after enrolled by the secret services. 23 This probably is the most challenging
task considering that the archives themselves host information and disinformation in the same dossier,
with much of the information generated by secret police personnel eager to generate useful data – in
order to prove how indispensable they are. Agent reports are full of insignificant details on the subjects’
daily lives – amassed in pain-stakingly amazing quantities. It is not surprising that prosecutions based
on these files drag on, and often lead to frustratingly minor results. In such an environment, it is already
an achievement to convict someone in 2003 for 6 years imprisonment for assisting the 1968 Soviet
invasion in Prague by blocking radio broadcasts. 24
20
See Turek v. Slovakia, Application no. 57986/00, Judgment of 14 February 2006, Bobek v. Poland, Application no. 68761/01, Judgment of
17 July 2007 and Matyjek v. Poland, Application no. 38184/03, final on 24 September 2007.
21
The case of Pavel Minarik in the Czech Republic who has been in and out of court for 15 years for allegedly planning to explode the
headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Munich is an instructive example here. See http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2006/06/21/agingsecret-police-haunted-by-prosecutions.php
and http://www.axisglobe.com/print_news.asp?news=10927.
22
Consider here the case of General Kuklinski.
23
See the decision of the Supreme Court in 2002 in the case of Marjan Jurczyk, where it was established that he was a useless collaborator
all along. The fact that Jurczyk signed the enrollment form did not make him into a collaborator by the terms of the lustration law. As
described in English in “The Politics of Memory in Poland”, Lavinia Stan, (2006), pp. 23–24, available at http://www.stfx.ca/pinstitutes/
cpcs/studies-in-post-communism/Stan2006.pdf.
24
Karel Hoffmann was sentenced to 6 years in prison for such a role in 2003. The case was prepared by the Czech Office for the
Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. As reported at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27833.htm. He
started his prison sentence at the age of 80. See http://www.radio.cz/en/article/56873. The case statistics of the Office – with the names of
the successfully prosecuted – are available in English on line at http://www.mvcr.cz/policie/udv/english/pripady/index.html.
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