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Poland’s new “lustration” law—a profound attack on democratic rights

by wsws (reposted)
In what has been described by the International Herald Tribune as a “mad” law that “makes the McCarthyites of the US in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practice of anti-Communism,” the Polish government has enacted legislation obliging 700,000 Poles to declare whether they collaborated with the secret police between 1945 and the resignation of Poland’s last Stalinist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski, in 1989.

The legislation—known in Poland as the “lustration law”—a term associated with the religious rite of purification—was designed by the identical twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, who respectively fill the post of President and Prime Minister. It requires that Poles of all professional stripes—from journalists, to lawyers, to CEOs—who were born before August 1, 1972, fill in a form and answer the question: “Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former Communist security services?” Those who fail to do so risk being banned from their professions for up to a decade.

Significantly, the law does not require that the clergy participate, even though, according to conservative estimates, one in ten Polish priests collaborated with the Stalinist regime. This issue recently surfaced with the resignation of Stanislaw Wielgus from the post of archbishop of Warsaw in January. (See Wielgus collaborated with Stalinist secret service Poland: Archbishop's resignation exposes crisis of Catholic Church)

Declarations are to be submitted by May 15 to the notoriously right-wing National Remembrance Institute (IPN), a governmental body founded in 1998, whose main purpose is investigating crimes committed by the Stalinist authorities before 1989. There they will then be examined and compared with the mountains of files on private individuals compiled by the Stalinist secret police between 1945 and 1989, a process that could take ten years or more.

“Poland needs this law,” said IPN chief Janusz Kurtyka. “The country is still in the process of leaving the communist period behind and tackling the long-term social and political effects of the dictatorship.”

More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/pol-a18.shtml
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