chapter 6
The Politics of the Lustration Law in Poland,
1989–2006
Adam Czarnota
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Introduction
The Polish lustration law is a brief text, and is not particularly unusual in comparison
to lustration legislation in other former communist states. It is, in fact,
rather dull and boring. The law was the outcome of a legislative compromise.
It is not radical in terms of penalties, but it is broad in terms of the groups
required to undergo the lustration procedure. It penalizes specifically only the
telling of a “lustration lie,” rather than membership in or collaboration with
communist secret services. The most interesting, if not fascinating, part of the
law is its political context or, in other words, the politics of the lustration law
in Poland. A “black letter” analysis of the law alone cannot provide answers to
questions about why the lustration law was adopted so late, why it is so “soft,”
to what preliminary outcome its introduction has led, and what obstacles it
has faced to its full implementation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to access
all the data necessary to answer these questions because the process remains
under way. Even describing what direction to look in order to find answers is
not an easy task and requires the application of different methods — hence the
hybrid structure and methodology of this chapter. Lustration is a very contested
issue; it is nearly impossible to adopt a neutral position toward it.
	 Importantly, in the context of a project such as this one, the discussion
about “lustration” — which in other places goes by “vetting” — in Poland, as
in other post-communist countries, focused narrowly on electoral and some
other highly public offices (in the sense of those institutions’ role in public
opinion formation) plus the judiciary and advocates, but not on processes
of personnel renewal in, for example, security sector institutions. This is so
despite the fact that, as I will show below, some of these institutions in fact
established rather ambitious personnel screening procedures.1 Screening for
human rights abuses and other forms of misconduct that took place, on a
fairly large scale, within some areas of the security sector was not called “lustration”
sensu stricto. It was called “verification of personnel” [weryfikacja],
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and I refer to it later as “vetting.” In public discourse, the term “lustration” was
used in the restrictive sense explained here, and this will be the real focus of
this chapter.
	 The Polish lustration law has been in operation for just six years. The lustration
law adopted by the Polish Parliament on April 11, 1997 (uniform text
Dziennik Ustaw, 1999, Nr 42, poz. 428), formally became valid law on August
3, 1997, but could not be enforced without the creation of a Lustration Court.
After the amendments of June 18, 1998 (Dziennik Ustaw, Nr 131, poz. 860),
which entered into effect on November 27, 1998, verification of lustration declarations
was made possible. Full enforcement became possible on December
1, 1998, with the creation of the V Department (Lustration Court) in the Warsaw
Appellate Court. A commissioner for the public interest was nominated
by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Adam Strzembosz, on October 16,
1998, and formally took office on January 1, 1999.
	 In the next section, I describe the sometimes dramatic history of the lustration
debate and legislation in the Polish III Republic. I then provide an overview
of the lustration law itself, and examine the functioning of the law over
the past six years. In the following two sections, I evaluate the lustration law
from both a public opinion perspective and in terms of its success in achieving
its stated aims. In the final section I analyze the Polish lustration law from
the point of view of a post-communist social theory.
History of lustration in post-1989 Poland
Introduction
The present lustration law is the result of many years of debate regarding lustration,
its form, and its substance. This debate was conducted both within
and outside of Parliament. The question of dealing with the communist past
in some form, formulated broadly as the “lustration issue,” crystallized during
the debate around three points:
•	 lustration proper, which means screening and barring from public
office former collaborators and members of secret services who committed
“lustration lies”;
•	 access to secret services files; and
•	 decommunization, which refers to all political and legal strategies
aimed at eradicating the legacies of communism in the social and
political system. Lustration is part of decommunization but is analytically
narrower in scope. In particular, decommunization includes
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a legal ban of communist parties, the confiscation of the property of
communist parties, the penalization of the use of communist propaganda,
the use of criminal law against former communist officials, and
so on.2
	 These issues, together with other legal strategies, such as restitution of
property and retributive justice for former communist crimes, constitute the
legal dimension of the crucial problem euphemistically called “dealing with
the past.” In the case of the peaceful transition of power in Poland, these issues
were and are hotly debated. Quite often it is very difficult to separate them,
even analytically, especially lustration from decommunization. The aim of
this chapter is to focus on the lustration law alone. It is puzzling that the first
country to break with the monopoly of Communist Party rule was not the
first to adopt a lustration law. There is no shortage of explanations, however,
some of which are explored throughout this chapter.
	 Since 1989 it is possible to distinguish three different phases in Poland’s
approach to the lustration issue, legislation, and legal implementation. The
discussion about lustration can be seen as a process of growing awareness of
the nature of lustration and of differentiating it from other transitional justice
measures. The first phase, between 1989 and 1992, was characterized by broad
and chaotic debates about dealing with the past, only part of which concerned
lustration. The second phase, between 1993 and 2001, was occupied by
attempts to clarify the lustration issue and create the legal-institutional framework
to deal with it. The main result of this phase was the adoption of the
lustration statute of April 11, 1997, as a result of compromise between political
forces in the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish Parliament. The third phase,
which began in 2001, is a by-product of the change in the configuration of
political forces that followed the 2001 election, won by the post-communist
Democratic Left Alliance [Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej] (SLD).3 This phase has
been characterized primarily by legislative attempts to restrict the scope of
lustration.
History of the issue4
The first suggestions that some sort of lustration was necessary came in 1990
from the Citizen’s Parliamentary Club [Obywatelski Klub Parlamentarny] (OKP),
which included all members of the so-called contract parliament (meaning
it was not fully freely elected) from the anti-communist opposition. Roman
Bartoszcze, a Member of Parliament (MP) from OKP, and one of the leaders of
the independent peasant’s movement, argued the necessity of screening secret
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police files for reasons of state security and to critically deal with Poland’s
communist past. Bartoszcze created a political storm within the opposition
political forces by urging the investigation of the relationship between some
members of the OKP and the communist secret police, the Security Service
[Słuz˙ba Bezpiecze´nstwa], well known by the abbreviation SB.5 The first postcommunist
governments — the political base of which was in the OKP — such
as Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s and then Krzysztof Bielecki’s, failed to take up Bartoszcze’s
suggestion.
	 The Senate, the upper chamber of the Polish Parliament, prepared a draft
verification procedure for candidates running for election to Parliament in
1991. The draft, which suggested screening candidates for collaboration with
the communist secret services, was voted down. Another attempt involved a
secret list of parliamentary candidates who had collaborated with the secret
police during the communist period, prepared in 1991 by Andrzej Mielczanowski,
the head of the State Security Office [Urza˛d Ochrony Pa´nstwa] (UOP).
The justification for compiling this list was the security of the state; it was
treated as part of the security screening mechanism presumed to exist in all
democratic states. If we take into account the fragility of the political situation
in 1991, the close connection between Mielczanowski and President Lech
Wałe˛sa, and especially Mielczanowski’s role in the so-called Józef Oleksy
scandal in 1995,6 it is highly probable that this list played an important political
role as part of the efforts of Wałe˛sa’s political camp to discredit its opponents
and improve its own position.
	 Right-wing-oriented political parties supported lustration and decommunization.
A new impetus for dealing with the issue of lustration came after
the election in 1991, when Antoni Maciarewicz became the minister of internal
affairs in the right-wing Olszewski government. Maciarewicz had been a
member of the anti-communist opposition since 1976 and a member of the
famous Workers’ Defense Committee [Komitet Obrony Robotników] (KOR),
together with Jacek Kuro´n and Adam Michnik. From the very beginning,
Maciarewicz represented nationalist and Catholic ideology in the opposition
movement. He was also editor of the influential samizdat journal Glos. In his
new position, Maciarewicz organized a department of studies in the cabinet
of the minister of internal affairs that focused on the archival resources of the
secret police of the Polish People’s Republic.7 The aim of the unit was to prepare
a report that would show the danger to state structures if lustration were
to be abandoned.
	 The next dramatic act took place in May and June 1992. On May 28, the
Sejm adopted a motion proposed by Janusz Korwin-Mikke, leader of the radi-
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cally liberal libertarian political party, which obliged the minister of internal
affairs to present full information to the Sejm by June 6 about higher civil
servants and members of both parliamentary chambers who were secret
collaborators with the communist secret police between 1945 and 1990. The
motion required Maciarewicz to provide full information about judges, public
prosecutors, and advocates within two months, and information about
representatives of local territorial self-governing bodies at different administrative
levels within six months. This motion, adopted by the Sejm, became
the legal basis for the minister’s actions. On June 4, Maciarewicz presented to
the MPs a document from the archival resources of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs in relation to MPs, senators, and persons holding high-level offices in
the state. The list of sixty-four names included: the new president of Poland,
Lech Wałe˛sa; three ministers; eight deputy ministers; three officers from the
president’s office; thirty-nine members of Parliament; and eleven senators. It
is not surprising that making such a list public created a political storm. The
minister stressed that the list was not one of collaborators with the communist
secret police; rather it referred to individuals about whom information
was available in the ministry’s archives. He suggested that a special commission
be organized, with the chief justice of the Supreme Court as head, to verify
these materials. The idea of lustration, however, was compromised by the
ensuing political scandal.8
	 Opponents of the idea argued that it was purely an act of political
revenge. The transformed communist party opposed lustration and claimed
that, for the sake of reconciliation, all lustration efforts should be abandoned.
Another argument used by liberal-democratic forces, represented mainly
by the Democratic Union [Unia Demokratyczna], stressed the legal continuity
between the communist Polish People’s Republic and the post-communist
Third Republic, which, they argued, precluded any act of political revenge.
This position, expressed quite often by Adam Michnik and his newspaper
Gazeta Wyborcza, stressed the transfer of power through round-table talks as
a decisive moment. The former communists had recognized the opposition,
and, as a result, the political agreements achieved at the round-table talks
between the two sides (the communists and the opposition) were translated
into constitutional and legal language.
	 The consequence that Michnik derived from this peaceful form of transfer
of power was a sort of self-limitation of both the former communists and the
opposition. The new post-communist period began not as a result of revolution
but of cooperation between two political camps through legal reforms.
One of the first amendments to the communist constitution was a provision
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that Poland was a law-governed state [Rechtsstaat]. This had its own consequences.
This legal argument had a political dimension in the Polish sociopolitical
landscape. Some of the leading political forces in the Democratic Union
looked for a coalition between reformist elements in the former communist
party and liberal-democratic forces as a necessary political precondition for
the successful modernization and democratization of society and the state.
For members or sympathizers of the right-oriented political parties, by contrast,
the political compromise — which was a virtue for the liberal left — was
the original sin of the Polish III Republic, a corrupt foundation upon which it
was impossible to build a new democratic society and its political institutions.
The right-oriented political forces looked to lustration as a partial remedy for
this original mistake.
	 In order to understand the discussion about lustration and decommunization,
and the position of particular political forces in these debates, it is
also necessary to take into account the economic dimension. The transfer of
power in Poland was preceded by the accumulation of economic power by
some people from the former political apparatus who were especially connected
with the secret services. By 1989 these people were able to translate
their political position into being able to extract economic rent. The lawgoverned-state
formula, that is, the rule of law, was then crucial in legally safeguarding
the new private property acquired on quite dubious legal grounds.
This economic background played a very important, but not always articulated,
role in the debate about lustration and decommunization.
	 Resistance to lustration also came from post-Solidarity9 political groupings,
such as parts of the Democratic Union and the Liberal-Democratic
Congress [Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny], which used technical arguments
to claim that, due to the nature of the documents on which lustration would
inevitably be based, it would be impossible to create a just process. Supporters
of lustration came from the same Solidarity circles, and looked at lustration
as a sort of medicine for the pathologies and problems of transformation.
An important part of their arguments focused on the continuation of
informal communist structures concentrated around people from the former
communist secret services.10
	 On June 19, 1992, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the minister of
internal affairs’ action, based on the motion adopted by the Sejm, was unconstitutional.
The tribunal found that the Sejm’s resolution violated individual
dignity and at the same time did not provide any means of protection for persons
screened. This led “to the violation of the good name of the persons to
whom the information applies and creates a sui generis penalty of infamy.”11
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According to the Constitutional Tribunal, this was inconsistent with the formula
of a law-governed state expressed in article 1 of the so-called Little Constitution,
the constitutional law in force at the time.
	 These events had an enduring effect on the public perception of the lustration
process in Poland. Generally the mass media presented lustration as
one of the following: (1) part of a conspiracy aimed at a coup d’état by rightwing
political parties; (2) a conspiracy of political forces connected with the
former communist regime and some elements of the post-Solidarity parties
to eliminate Jan Olszewski’s12 government; or (3) a totally discredited idea in
whatever form.13 The events of June 1992, as well as the work of a special parliamentary
commission to investigate the execution of the Sejm’s lustration
motion, which cleared Minister Maciarewicz of the accusation of using the
motion for political purposes, created a situation that forced the legislature to
address the lustration issue.
	 In September 1992 the Sejm started debate on six different drafts of a lustration
law, prepared by various political parties (including the Solidarity
trade union), one of which came from the Senate. Two drafts were, let us say,
“soft,” proposing only verification and making public knowledge of instances
of collaboration with secret services. Other drafts were more severe, proposing
lustration and decommunization together; these would ban collaborators
and persons who held positions as executive officers at all levels of the Communist
Party from holding public positions in the new state. Parliamentary
debate thus slid into discussion of decommunization rather than lustration
per se.
	 Lustration as a topic of public debate continued during the parliamentary
election campaign of 1993. After the election the majority in the new Parliament
was held by a coalition of the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance
[Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej] (SLD) and Polish People’s Party [Polskie
Stronictwo Ludowe] (PSL) — both opponents of lustration. In July 1994 there
was debate in the Sejm on eight drafts of a lustration law. Some of these were
old drafts prepared before the election and some were new. In this debate one
could distinguish not two but three positions.14 One was held by a group of
strong opponents of lustration based around the SLD party. The second was
held by a group that consisted of strong advocates of radical lustration represented
by the Confederation for an Independent Poland [Konfederacja Polski
Niepodległej] (KPN); radical lustration, based on the Czechoslovak model,
was actually close to decommunization. The third position, held by a centrist
group, favored restricted lustration, which meant limiting the group of people
to be screened to the top echelon of the former communist state. The radical
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opponents succeeded in blocking lustration and for a long time the drafts disappeared
from public view.
	 In June 1996, following internal decisions in the Sejm, when the legislative
process started four new drafts were discussed.15 The basis for the work of the
special parliamentary commission for a lustration law was a draft prepared
by the post-Solidarity Union of Freedom [Unia Wolno´sci], the Union of Labor
[Unia Pracy], and part of the post-communist PSL. The resulting lustration
law was adopted by the Sejm on April 11, 1997. The statute, containing thirty
articles, established a mixed model of broad (in the sense that a broad range
of people became the object of the law), but not radical, lustration. The radical
model was based on a connection between lustration and decommunization.
The final outcome was a compromise, and the law only punished the telling
of a “lustration lie,” but not conscious collaboration. It did not punish people
who consciously collaborated with the secret services but had admitted
this publicly. The majority in the Sejm refused to use lustration as a tool for
decommunization; the radical Czech model of lustration was turned down.
The next year, however, after a parliamentary election in which post-Solidarity
forces won, the lustration statute was amended. The amendment adopted
on June 18, 1998, made the lustration law more radical and changed its institutional
design. Only eight articles remained unchanged.
	 After its adoption, the political opposition to lustration, mainly former
communists and Adam Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, mobilized forces to
soften the law as much as possible. The first attempt was made by President
Aleksander Kwa´sniewski.16 Before signing the new law, Kwa´sniewski sent it
to the Constitutional Tribunal to determine its constitutionality. The Constitutional
Tribunal, in two rulings, confirmed the constitutionality of the law,
questioning only two articles. The first was an article that made it possible to
restart lustration procedures against persons who had already gone through
the process. The tribunal said that, because there were no provisions regarding
time limitation on restarting the procedure, the article created a state of
permanent insecurity and limitation of freedom. The second article related
to the removal of a candidate for the presidency who made a false lustration
declaration, which the tribunal said amounted to a limitation of voting
rights.17 At the same time, however, an unexpected obstacle to the implementation
of the law came from the judiciary. One of the law’s provisions created
a Lustration Court, to which judges would be elected by the judges’ own selfgoverning
bodies. The required judges had not been elected by the deadline.
Further amendments were necessary to address difficulties in creating the
Lustration Court.
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	 In terms of the operation of the amended lustration law, the most important
trend occurred during the third phase of the history of lustration in
Poland. After the post-communists won the next election, they initiated a
series of amendments aimed at making lustration meaningless. The most
important of these was an attempt to restrict the types of facts that could be
used as evidence of “collaboration” or “service.” The first step in this direction
was an amendment of February 15, 2002, which limited the scope of application
of the law by removing from it former collaborators with military intelligence
and counterintelligence. Additionally, the amendment introduced a
very imprecise clause that exempted from the list of objectionable collaborations
actions that did not endanger personal and civil rights and freedoms.
The majority of that amendment was struck down by the Constitutional Tribunal’s
verdict of June 19, 2002 (K11/02), on purely procedural grounds.18
	 Another attempt to limit the impact of lustration came in an amendment
of September 13, 2002, which limited the definition of “collaboration”
in such a way that, in effect, most forms of what is commonly understood as
collaboration were excluded. “Collaboration,” as defined in the amendment,
did not include gathering and passing information for intelligence, counterintelligence
activities, or activities conducted in defense of the state borders.
It also protected those individuals who alleged that they only “pretended” to
collaborate, despite their fulfillment of all formal requirements expected from
the secret services. This second restriction was inspired by a Supreme Court
judgment of October 2, 2002 (Syg. Akt II KKN 311/01), in the cassation19 case
of Marian Jurczyk, one of the leaders of Solidarity in Szczecin, in which the
court moved towards a material — meaning substantive — understanding of
collaboration.20 In making an evaluation of the outcome of collaboration and
not restricting itself to the establishment of the fact of collaboration, the court
moved outside the formal application of the legal definition of “collaboration”
as stated in the lustration law. The judgment was rightly criticized as unjustified
judicial activism.
The Polish lustration law
Overview of the law
The lustration statute is composed of forty articles in six chapters, plus an
annex. There is no legal definition of “lustration” in the text of the statute. The
term itself is confusing and has different definitions in different countries. The
word lustration became well known after Czechoslovakia’s so-called velvet
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revolution. In Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, lustrace meant a
ban on the holding of a public position by functionaries of the Communist
Party or political police. The application of the term was broad and radical.
It included decommunization as such. It meant banning office holders in the
communist regimes from public life in new democratic regimes for some time.
This broad definition was not, however, adopted by other post-communist
countries. They preserved the word “lustration” but, due to their political contexts,
gave it a different meaning. This explains part of the confusion in analyses
of the lustration laws in post-communist countries.
	 In the Polish context, lustration means something different and is used
in a narrow sense, as the public unveiling of individual connections with the
secret services, and only with the secret services, by persons holding public
office or candidates for public offices in the newly democratic state. The aim
was to cleanse the public space of “wild lustration” — the periodic publication
of lists of collaborators and accusations of collaboration with former communist
secret services, accusations from which those who suffered them had no
means to defend their good names. Wild lustrations had become a powerful
weapon in political life in Poland. Those who supported the introduction of a
lustration law believed that it would guarantee a minimum level of civility in
political discourse, provide citizens with the necessary information to make
informed political choices, and defend the categories of people affected by the
lustration procedure from manipulation and blackmail. Generally speaking,
they thought it would clean up the poisoned atmosphere of public life after
communism.
	 The statute of April 11, 1997, imposes a duty on people born before May
11, 1972 — which means all those who were adults according to law before the
transfer of power took place in 1989 — who hold or are candidates for enumerated
public positions in the state, to make a statement regarding their
work for or collaboration with secret services (institutions of state security)
between 1944 and 1990. The obligation to make a positive or negative lustration
statement is imposed on a broad range of people holding executive positions
in the state or important positions in the state administration, including
the president of the republic, MPs, senators, judges, procurators, advocates,
and people holding key positions in Polish Public Television, Polish Public
Radio, the Polish Press Agency, and the Polish Information Agency.
	 Lustration statements consist of parts A and B, as stated in the annex to
the statute. Part A is simply a declaration that a person did or did not work
for or collaborate with institutions of state security. Part B (not made public)
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includes details of work or collaboration in the case of a positive statement.
The names of those who make positive statements are published in the official
gazette, Monitor Polski, or, in the case of candidates for the presidency and the
lower or upper houses of Parliament, in electoral proclamations. The names
appear without details of the type of collaboration. In this way, those who
declare that they were members of or consciously collaborated with the secret
services can still be candidates for public office, and the decision about their
future is left in the hands of the electorate. The Polish lustration law penalizes
only a lie about collaboration, not the collaboration itself.
	 Verification of a negative lustration statement is performed by the commissioner
for the public interest. If there is suspicion of a lie in the lustration
statement, the commissioner initiates a case before the Lustration Court.
Court rulings confirming lustration lies are made public. The legal effects of
such court rulings are different depending on the position held by the person
involved. MPs or senators will lose their seats but can run as candidates in
the next election. In the case of judges, an additional ruling of the disciplinary
court is required.
Definitions
Despite the lack of a legal definition of “lustration,” the law clearly designates
three necessary elements in the lustration process, namely: institutions of
state security during the communist regime between 1944 and 1990; persons
holding public office; and past collaboration with institutions of state security
under the communist regime. Some combination of holding public office
or aspiring to hold public office and former employment in or collaboration
with the institutions of state security under the communist regime has to
exist. The definitions of these elements are therefore crucial.
	 Article 2 of the statute defines the security institutions of the state as all secret
services in Poland, including intelligence and counterintelligence, between
1944 and 1990. Article 2, subsection 11.2, also includes the military and civil
institutions of foreign countries that fulfill the same function as the abovementioned
Polish institutions.
	 Article 3 enumerates the category of persons holding public offices. As mentioned
above, these are: the president of the republic, MPs, senators, and persons
nominated or elected to executive functions in the state; head of the civil
service; directors in ministries, central offices, and voivodeship offices (state
regional administration);21 judges, procurators, and advocates; members of
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the board of Polish Public TV and Radio; directors of regional TV and radio
centers; the director of the Polish Press Agency; and the director of the Polish
Information Agency.
	 The last definition is collaboration. According to article 4.1, “collaboration
is conscious and secret collaboration with operational or investigating units
or organs of the state security as a secret informer or helper with the gathering
of information.” In its 1997 decision the Constitutional Tribunal provided
binding interpretation of the notion of “collaboration.” The tribunal stated
that a simple commitment to collaborate, even evidenced by a signature, is
not sufficient, and that what constitutes collaboration are specific actions
such as operational gathering of information and passing it to officers of the
secret services.22 Subsections 2 and 4 of article 4 contain limitations on the
definition of “collaboration.” These state that collaboration is not an activity
that was imposed by statutes, and that “fake collaboration” does not count as
collaboration.
	 An amendment excluded collaboration with state security institutions
imposed by law, a situation that could occur when categories of persons (for
instance, border guard officers) were obliged by law to collaborate in order to
preserve state security. The limitation was based on the idea that collaboration
in such cases was a legal duty imposed on individuals, who had to do it
even if it was against their will. The counterargument, of a moral nature and
put forward by the opposition to the amendment, was that nobody forced
people to work in these institutions.
	 More difficult is the question of so-called fake collaboration, in which a
person claims to have signed a document that she or he would collaborate
with the secret services without any intention to actually collaborate and
that she or he never passed on any information or passed on only unimportant
information. Fake collaboration is difficult to prove because of the secret
nature of collaboration in general. Due to limited evidence, it is nearly impossible
to make any judgment about whether alleged collaboration is fake or not.
Furthermore, considering how secret services operate throughout the world,
it is safe to say that for them there is no such thing as unimportant information.
All information is important and can be put to use at the proper time.
	 The Polish lustration law is aimed at categories of people who have a special,
delineated connection between past and present. The past element is the
relation to state security institutions, as employment or collaboration. This
group of people is in turn limited, from the point of view of lustration, by
another criterion: that they hold specific public offices in the present. In other
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words, collaborators with the secret services or former officers of state security
institutions who do not hold public offices at present or are not candidates
for such offices are outside the purview of the lustration law.
The Office of the Commissioner for the Public Interest
The institution of the Office for the Commissioner for the Public Interest plays
a crucial role in the Polish lustration law. The commissioner and two deputy
commissioners are nominated by the chief justice of the Supreme Court from
among the candidates eligible to become judges who have broad legal knowledge
and who were not collaborators with the secret services according to
the understanding of the statute. Candidates who agree to be nominated are
obliged to make a lustration declaration, which is first analyzed by the chief
justice and than sent to the Lustration Court for verification. After verification
the commissioner and deputy commissioners are formally nominated
for a six-year term in office. They cannot be members of political parties or be
involved in any activities that are incompatible with the dignity of the office.
They can be removed from office by the chief justice of the Supreme Court
only in circumstances strictly enumerated in article 17c. The statute creating
this office is meant to guarantee independence for the commissioners on the
same level as for judges.
	 The commissioner, who is involved in all phases of the process, represents
the public interest in the lustration procedure. In the initial stage the commissioner
evaluates the lustration statement and is responsible for deciding
whether it should be sent to the Lustration Court. After the Lustration Court
issues a ruling the commissioner is entitled to appeal the decision. The functions
of the commissioner are analysis of the lustration declaration; gathering
information necessary for evaluation of the declaration; and starting the
lustration procedure, described below, before the Lustration Court. The commissioner
is also obliged to provide a report of his or her activity annually to
the president, Sejm, Senate, prime minister, and chief justice of the Supreme
Court.
	 The commissioner has a supporting office, which by the end of 2001
employed thirty-seven people (including the commissioner and two deputies).
Employed staff included nineteen specialists dealing with the lustration verification
process (lawyers, historians, political scientists, etc.) and thirteen secretarial
staff. The budget of the commissioner’s office in 2001 was 4,308,000
Polish zlotys (PLZ) (approximately US$1,250,000).
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Initiating the lustration procedure
The lustration procedure can be initiated by the commissioner or a deputy
commissioner when the standard investigation indicates there is justifiable
doubt that a lustration declaration is true. Another option is for the Lustration
Court to start the lustration procedure ex officio in relation to the
commissioner. The Lustration Court can also begin the procedure based
on a petition by a person who stated that he or she worked or collaborated
under pressure, including threats to the life and health of that person or
close relatives.
Procedure before the Lustration Court
Each case is heard by three professional judges (normally, in criminal cases,
a hearing by three judges is reserved for serious crimes). In the original lustration
law there was a provision for the creation of a separate Lustration
Court. After the failure to delegate judges to this court, as described above,
an amendment named the Warsaw Appellate Court as the Lustration Court.
The judges sitting on the Lustration Court bench are designated by the president
of the appellate court. The lustration law includes a provision that judges
from the voivodeship courts (second level in the hierarchy of courts) can also
be delegated to sit on the Lustration Court.
	 According to article 19 of the law, the lustration procedure is regulated by
the Code of Criminal Procedure, with necessary changes as stipulated by the
lustration law of April 11, 1997. All provisions of the code apply to the person
accused of collaboration. The court, on its own initiative or that of parties to
the proceedings, can hold hearings closed to the public. The procedure ends
with the written decision of the court, which can be one of three types: stating
that a lustration declaration was untrue; stating that a declaration was
true; or making a decision to terminate a procedure due to lack of evidence
on the basis of which to evaluate the veracity of the lustration declaration.
The nonsecret part of the judgment is published in Monitor Polski, the official
government gazette.
Appeal and cassation
Within fourteen days of the judgment, parties can appeal the decision of the
Lustration Court of first instance. The appeal is then heard by three professional
judges, at least two of whom, including the presiding judge, must be
appellate court judges. Technically, an appeal is heard at the same Lustration
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Court but with different judges. From the decision of the court of the second
instance, parties have a right to cassation. Cassation is heard by the Supreme
Court within three months.
Reopening the procedure
The lustration procedure can be reopened, after a legally valid judgment is
made, in two cases: ex delicto, when an illegal act took place with impact on
the Lustration Court judgment; or de novis, when, after promulgation of a
legally valid judgment, new facts are discovered which put in doubt a lustration
declaration.
Sanctions
The only sanction for an untrue lustration declaration is the loss of moral
qualification to hold public office and a ban on holding one for ten years.
The statutory requirement for holding public office is moral qualification to
do so. Individuals currently in office who are found to have made an untrue
declaration automatically lose their position. In the case of some professions,
for instance retired judges, individuals also lose what amounts to their retirement
pensions. This is due to the legal construction that judges do not retire
but rather, after reaching retirement age, are not in active service. They do not
receive a pension as such but a percentage of their actual salary.
Functioning of the Lustration Law
Lustration as a topic in the context of transformation and decommunization
in Central and Eastern Europe has a history of more than sixteen years. The
lustration law in Poland, by contrast, has only been in force for six years. It
is thus easier to illustrate some of the problems with the functioning of the
lustration law than to make an overall holistic evaluation.
	 It must be kept in mind that the stated aim of the lustration law was the
security of the state and the elimination of potential political blackmail. However,
in Polish public opinion there is another aim that is not explicitly stated
in the statute, namely, the realization of some sort of transitional justice. Lustration
in public opinion is a substitute for decommunization, in this instance
in the sense of major personnel turnover in the various state institutions. It
is doubtful, however, whether this aim is being achieved, even in part, by the
lustration law as it was designed by the Polish Parliament. This is due to the
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limited nature of the law, the sanctions of which are restricted only to lustration
lies. Nevertheless, the connection of lustration with transitional justice
made the topic not only “hot” but sometimes explosive. In arguments made in
the media, both supporters and opponents disregard the actual provisions of
the statute and present the issue as highly normatively charged.
	 From the very beginning, however, the leading opinion makers in the
media, especially the influential newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, covered the
lustration process in a critical, if not negative, way, with the aim of turning
the public against it. A crucial point in the lustration debate concerned the
appointments of retired judge Bogusław Nizie´nski as commissioner for the
public interest and Krzysztof Kauba as deputy commissioner. They were
appointed by a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Adam Strzembosz,
on his last day in office on October 16, 1998. The controversy was triggered by
two issues: the men who were appointed, and the fact that the appointments
were made on the chief justice’s last day in office and without consultation.
For several years afterwards, Gazeta Wyborcza ran a campaign to discredit lustration
by publishing articles that were not only critical, but sought to undermine
the integrity of Commissioner Nizie´nski. Nizie´nski was a retired judge
known for his anti-communist opinions, who never became a member of the
Communist Party, but whose career as a judge nevertheless spanned the entire
hierarchy of positions in the Polish courts. As he stated in one interview, he
perceived his work on the bench as service to the nation and not to the communist
state. (Both the commissioner and the deputy commissioner have
appeared extremely devoted to their offices and unafraid of controversy.)
	 One point of contention that was raised in discussions of the lustration
law and procedure was the accountability of the commissioner and deputy
commissioners. In the statute, article 17a clearly states that both are obliged
to act within the law and the constitution, and make annual reports. While
neither position appears particularly strong, as designed in the statute the
commissioner’s role cannot be reduced to that of a public prosecutor. The
commissioner is endowed with the same level of independence as a judge, and
yet she or he represents the public interest in the lustration procedure. This
peculiarity reflects the specificity of lustration, which is not a typical procedure
as in criminal law. The institution represents a new type of legal institution
in public law.23
	 A second problem was connected to the order of verification of lustration
declarations. The commissioner was criticized for focusing first on judges and
advocates, a move that was interpreted as taking revenge on the professional
groups with which he was most familiar. His argument was that the highest
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number of positive declarations occurred within these categories, which made
the negative declarations call for strict verification. Commissioner Nizie´nski
explained that screening one person who had made a positive declaration
naturally led to other persons from the same profession and territorial region,
who, it seemed, had also made false declarations.24 On an alternative view,
however, since the primary aim of lustration was the security of the state, and
not decommunization, the verification order should have started with crucial
positions within the structure of the state. In other words, the importance of
the position from the point of view of the security of the state should have
determined the order of the commissioner’s verification of lustration declarations.
Advocates and judges are not as important, in this sense, as ministers
and undersecretaries of state. Criticism of the commissioner’s activities,
in this case, was therefore justified. The amendment that corrected article 17
states that verification should be carried out in the order of state positions
enumerated in article 7, starting with the most important.25
	 The next objection was to the secrecy of the procedure, both during the
initial verification conducted by the commissioner and later on before the
Lustration Court. There is no easy way around this because classified material
is used in the verification procedure and in the hearing before the Lustration
Court. On the other hand, it is true that such secrecy goes against the
principles of openness of justice. Commissioner Nizie´nski stated that while
the accused usually were not interested in an open trial,26 after requesting a
closed hearing they often themselves made statements to the media, which
fostered speculation about the entire procedure. This led to suggestions in the
newspapers that the Lustration Court was a kangaroo court or some sort of
inquisition having nothing in common with justice.
	 In a number of newspaper interviews and journal articles, commissioners
have complained about the negative media coverage, which demonized the
work of the first commissioner and focused only on sensational news.27 Commissioner
Nizie´nski was a public figure who did not avoid conflict and was
guided by a strong belief in the mission of his office. No doubt his strong personality
left its mark on the operation of the office. He was responsible for hiring,
determined the organization of the support staff, and, more importantly,
influenced public perception of the lustration process. On the other hand, his
successor, Włodzierz Olszewski, keeps a low profile in the media, and it is difficult
to find any reports on his activity, outside of formal announcements.
	 At the time of writing, 23,598 people have filled out lustration declarations,28
which, according to the lustration law, are all subject to the commissioner’s
scrutiny, which obviously imposes a great workload on him and the
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deputy commissioners. From 1999 to 2001, 150 persons declared that they had
worked for or collaborated with state security institutions and their names
were published in Monitor Polski. Among those were one secretary of state,
five undersecretaries, and one MP. In 2002 not one positive lustration declaration
was filed. By April 30, 2004,29 the commissioner had filed 126 cases with
the Lustration Court in relation to sixty-nine advocates; twenty parliamentarians;
twelve judges; nine ministers, deputy ministers, or higher civil servants;
seven public prosecutors; six journalists; and three voivodes. By April 30, 2004,
the court had made decisions in relation to 103 persons: 79.8% of first instance
verdicts and 80% of cases started by the commissioner were appealed. Fortyeight
verdicts of the Lustration Court of the second instance were subject to
cassation before the Supreme Court, of which eleven have been overturned
and twenty-five have been upheld. In fifty-three of the 103 cases the court confirmed
that the declaration was not true and in twenty cases it stated that the
declaration was true. Fourteen cases were discontinued for various reasons.30
	 In the first year of his activity, the commissioner sent questions to the state
security archives, where files were collected, regarding 2,296 people under
verification; in 2000 he sent 4,168 requests for information; and in 2001, 4,174
for a total of 10,638 persons. By the end of 2001, the lustration procedure was
finished for 6,689 individuals — 28.35% of all lustration declarations lodged
since 1997, when the law was adopted by Parliament.31 Out of the 1,896 individuals
whose cases were reviewed by the commissioner for public interest,
only forty-five had their cases submitted to the court and only twenty-three
were found to have told lustration lies.
	 According to the commissioner’s report for 2001, by October 19, 2001, declarations
by all people in key positions in the state had been scrutinized. The
parliamentary elections in 2001 brought 245 new declarations from MPs and
50 from senators. As part of the verification process, the commissioner and
his deputies interviewed forty-seven witnesses in 1999, fifty in 2000, and 112
in 2001. All witnesses were former officers of the secret police, military intelligence,
or counterintelligence. Commissioners complained that witnesses
were not cooperative and tried to hide the truth. In three cases the commissioner
informed the procuracy of obstruction of justice.32
	 The commissioner decided not to bring 293 cases before the Lustration
Court, despite the fact that the names of those involved were mentioned in
the archives of the special services, because there was insufficient evidence
to substantiate collaboration due to the destruction of documents. Furthermore,
witnesses claimed that they did not remember whether these individuals
collaborated with the former security institutions. Among these people,
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advocates again made up the biggest group with 181, followed by thirty MPs,
twenty-seven people from the media, ten procurators, and sixteen highranking
civil servants.33
Table 1
Lustration figures
	 23,598 	 Total lustration declarations (1999–present)	
	 6,689 	 Individuals completed lustration procedure (1999–2001)
	 278 	 Positive lustration declarations (1999–2004)
	 126	 Cases filed by Commissioner for the Public Interest with Lustration Court
		 (April 2004)	
	 209	 Witnesses interviewed as part of lustration procedure (1999–2001)
	 103	 Lustration Court verdicts (April 30, 2004)
	 53 	 Declarations confirmed not true by Lustration Court (May 2002)
	 20 	 Declarations confirmed true by Lustration Court (May 2002)
	 14 	 Cases discontinued by Lustration Court (May 2002)	
	 48	 Verdicts subject to cassation before Supreme Court (April 2004)
	 25	 Verdicts subject to cassation before Supreme Court upheld (April 2004)
	 11	 Verdicts subject to cassation before Supreme Court overturned (April 2004)
	 The commissioners’ reports have contained a number of complaints,
the first of which is about the law’s impotence.34 Commissioners suggested
that unreliable and uncooperative witnesses should be punished according
to article 233 of the criminal code, which contains provisions regarding false
testimony. The second complaint relates to the need for objective media coverage
of lustration activities, as mentioned above. Commissioners suggested
that, to this end, the procedure before the Lustration Court should be open
and public. The third complaint relates to procedural delays before the court
due to absences of persons under review. The lustration law does not equip
the court with any legal tool to require the presence of persons being investigated
during the hearings, a situation that was abused. Often, individuals
would produce medical certificates stating that due to illness they were not
able to attend the hearing, while at the same time they were appearing on television
to take part in parliamentary deliberations or voting. The fourth complaint
is connected to access to archival resources of the former state security
institutions. Since 2000 the Ministry of Internal Affairs has been transferring
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242
archival resources to the Institute of National Remembrance. The transfer
process has been very slow, and, even after the institute receives the archival
materials, it lacks the funds to properly arrange and file them.
	 The lustration law does not operate in an institutional vacuum. The process
is implemented within an institutional setting, which plays an important
role and brings with it a number of problems. The first and biggest problem
was the impossibility of creating a Lustration Court according to the provisions
of the first version of the lustration statute prior to the subsequent
amendments. According to the original provision, twenty-one judges for the
special Lustration Court would be nominated by the judges’ self-governing
body, the National Judicial Council, from candidates nominated at meetings
of all judges in appellate and voivodeship courts. Those nominations had to be
made within thirty days of the entry into force of the lustration law. Judges
were to be delegated by the minister of justice for four years to the Lustration
Court, which was to be located at the Warsaw Appellate Court. However, not
enough candidates were nominated within the prescribed time. As the lustration
law’s immediate aim, which was to establish an institutional structure for
the lustration of MP and senatorial candidates before the parliamentary elections
of September 21, 1997, was therefore not achieved, critics used this failure
to claim that lustration was unnecessary.35 This obstacle was overcome,
however, by the June 1998 amendment that created the Lustration Court as a
special division of the Warsaw Appellate Court.
	 One of the most controversial issues connected with the functioning of
the lustration law was a decision of the minister of justice/procurator general
to fire three procurators who had made positive lustration declarations
admitting their collaboration with the secret services. The law itself does not
include such a sanction in its provisions. What is penalized is providing a false
declaration, not a positive declaration. Nevertheless, the minister of justice/
procurator general’s decision was based on the idea that the people in question
had lost the necessary moral qualification to perform the functions connected
with their offices. This was followed by an appeal to the presiding justices
of the courts to remove judges who were compromised by collaboration
with the communist regime’s state security institutions. The appeal provoked
a rather negative, if not angry, reaction from the judiciary and lawyers’ professional
organizations, such as the Association of Polish Lawyers.
	 Disciplinary sanctions applied by institutions to persons who have made
positive lustration declarations are a side effect or, as some claim, an extension
of the lustration statute.36 It shows that lustration is sometimes confused
with decommunization. Polish law should in some way regulate these types of
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cases, either by accepting the application of disciplinary sanctions or strictly
forbidding it. The exact scale of this phenomenon is unknown, but appears to
be rather small. It could, however, become a larger problem with a change of
the political context, for example, if the pro-lustration radical parties receive
a bigger say in the public arena.
	 Cases of judges and procurators were regulated by a statute of December
8, 1998, on disciplinary responsibilities for breaching the independence of the
judiciary; all such cases were only in relation to retired judges and procurators.
Between 1998 and 2002 the minister for justice started seventy-three
procedures against retired judges and seventy-seven against retired procurators.37
On April 17, 1999, the National Advocates’ Council adopted a motion
stating that collaboration with the secret services between 1944 and 1990
amounted to acts against Polish society and constituted a crucial breach of
the moral requirement for the profession. The motion also asked those who
had collaborated to leave the profession. Unfortunately, until the lustration
procedure comes to an end it is impossible to know how many people are
involved. So far, the names of a small number of those who returned positive
lustration declarations have been published in Monitor Polski. Former members
of the profession removed from the list of advocates tried to appeal the
decisions before the Constitutional Court, but without success.38
The lustration process in public opinion
How has the general public perceived the Polish lustration law? After the 1992
dismissal of Olszewski’s government because of Maciarewicz’s list and its
inclusion39 of high-ranking officials such as Lech Wałe˛sa, lustration became
a hot political issue. The next moment of high tension came in 1996, concerning
the political use of secret service files, when former Prime Minister
Józef Oleksy was accused of being a Soviet spy and was forced to resign from
office.
	 Although polls cannot provide precise measurements of public opinion,
they nevertheless can reveal trends. In opinion polls conducted by the Center
for Public Opinion Research [O´srodek Badania Opinii Publicznej] (OBOP) in
December 1996, 72% of respondents were convinced that many high-ranking
officials had previously been informants and collaborators with the secret
police; 77% believed that such officials should be removed from office.40
According to polls conducted by the OBOP in June 1994 and December 1996,
57% of the population supported lustration. In December 1997 that number
rose to 76% and in November 1999 it dropped to 56%. Support for lustration
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is strongly correlated with political party affiliation. The largest percentage of
lustration opponents is within the SLD (former communist) electorate, while
the largest percentage of supporters is within the post-Solidarity, right-wing
electorate.
	 It is interesting to note the trend that the public’s opinion of lustration
became more negative after the lustration law became operational. In opinion
polls conducted each year from 1994 to 2002, support for lustration dropped
and negative evaluations increased. In 2002, a decidedly negative opinion was
expressed by 31% of respondents and a decidedly positive one by only 33%.
The opinion that the lustration law had a bad impact on political life in Poland
was expressed by 51%, while only 30% believed that lustration improved political
life in Poland.41 Nevertheless, over the years support for lustration has
remained relatively high and surprisingly steady. Over the years, on average
more than 50% of the population has supported the lustration law in Poland.
Evaluation of the lustration law in Poland
There are different methods of evaluating the lustration law. It seems to me
that only one way, based on the realization of the aims of the lustration statute,
is justifiable. In other words, the evaluation should be rooted specifically
within the Polish context and not based on some abstract, universal criteria.
It is commonplace for sociologists of law to argue that the operation or functioning
of specific norms and legal institutions depends on the institutional
and cultural context. That context in the Polish case, and probably in any
other post-communist country, is rather fragile as far as democratic institutional
infrastructure and legal culture are concerned. One of the aims of
the lustration law was to help to build a democratic and legal culture in postcommunist
Poland by providing citizens with information about the prior
involvement in the operation of the secret services of the communist regime
of people aspiring to hold public offices; in this way, the idea was, citizens
could make informed choices. The lustration law, by making public knowledge
the names of those who confirm their collaboration, frees them from
potential political blackmail. It is impossible to measure whether lustration,
after only six years in operation, has been able to fulfill this aim. At best, an
indirect approach to answering the question can be tried. I will discuss this in
the next section on lustration and post-communism in Poland.
	 From a sociological point of view, the largest group obliged to make lustration
declarations have been lawyers — approximately twenty thousand people.
The rule of law requires a strong legal profession with strong moral character,
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which will guarantee the professional autonomy of law. Yet, despite years of
functioning, the lustration process has not had a significant impact upon lawyers.
Nevertheless, it may help in the process of transforming the legal profession
through at least partial sanation (cleansing), as demonstrated by the
position, adopted by the self-governing body of the advocates, that advocates
compromised by collaboration should make public their involvement, and by
the disclosure of the identities of judges compromised by collaboration.
	 One of the critical factors in determining the effectiveness of lustration,
particularly when the aim is to eliminate dangers to the new regime, is timing.
The Polish lustration law entered into force very late in the transition
because of political struggles. These struggles made lustration more politically
charged, or connected with political processes. At the same time lustration
lost its teeth while, paradoxically, public expectations grew higher.
	 One of the positive outcomes of the lustration law’s late arrival is its “softness.”
In comparison to the harsh Czech approach, lustration in Poland is
not focused on revenge or the elimination of certain groups of people from
power. It is focused on the penalization of lies. All necessary elements of the
rule of law, such as presumption of innocence, broad rights of the defendant,
and proper court procedure, are observed. This makes the Polish lustration
process as civilized as possible. It is true that this civility could be improved by
distancing the process from political abuse, speeding up the procedure before
the Lustration Court, and providing objective coverage in the media. Nevertheless,
the very existence of the lustration law and the institutions it created
eliminated wild lustration and provided wrongly accused persons with a legal
tool for their defense outside of the normal procedure for defamation.
	 The lustration law sought to clean up the public sphere, which requires
transparency. Procedures before the Lustration Court should in turn be more
open to the public. The secrecy of the procedures has not contributed to the
realization of the aims of the law. Despite the fact that classified material was
used, the openness of the procedure could be improved.
	 The lustration law was too often changed as an outcome of political processes,
which destabilized the lustration process. It is true that the first statute
was not an example of “legislative art” and amendments were necessary,
but some of the subsequent changes, made after the last election won by SLD,
were introduced purely for political reasons. A good example of this is the
manipulation of the definition of “collaboration,” as described above.
	 The lustration laws in post-communist countries do not serve the same
function as security clearances in liberal democracies. Lustration is one of
the legal devices for dealing with the past, alongside other procedures such
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as decommunization, restitution of property, and trials for perpetrators of
crimes committed under the communist regime for political reasons. All
these legal tools should be analyzed together, but such a task is beyond the
scope of this chapter. In the final section, however, I will discuss the lustration
process in Poland within the broader context of post-communist efforts to
deal with the past.
The lustration law and post-communism
What I have offered hitherto is an analysis that focuses on the legal and sociolegal
dimensions of the Polish lustration law. Here I want to discuss the law
from the point of view of social theory. The problem is that so far we do not
have a satisfactory social theory of post-communism. That is why I will try
to sketch the relationship between lustration and other strategies for dealing
with the communist past in Poland after 1989.
	 All transitional justice projects presuppose some sort of social theory usually
not very far removed from Durkheim’s concept of law as an expression
of mechanical solidarity, as values shared by members of a society. Law is an
expression of the moral matrix of society; in effect, law defends the type of
social relations that are most valuable for the society. A post-Durkheimian
perspective adds the assumption that legal institutions could infuse society
with some of the values necessary for democracy and the rule of law. This
assumption treats post-communist societies as in a transitional phase from
point A to point B, where point B is a fully developed liberal-democratic society
with all the necessary institutions and values. Lustration, decommunization,
and restitution of property are legal mechanisms for the realization of
that aim.
	 I prefer to use the term transformation, rather than transition, to describe
the social processes after the collapse of communism. This allows us to look
at the specificity of the new institutions developed, trace the elements of the
new social and institutional structure, and stress the role of those institutions
in building something new. I will adopt this approach to these extraordinary
processes in my analysis of the sociopolitical context of the Polish lustration
law.
	 The initial problem is the past, especially the communist past, with which
all post-communist countries are obliged to cope. All have developed institutions
that allow them to do this. Those institutions are supposed to address
local issues. Dealing with the past sounds like a universal problem, but behind
it are always particularities — local settings, relations, and structures. The local
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dimensions of policies dealing with the past were and are different, but it is
possible to identify some similarities due to a common denominator — these
are not policies to deal with just any past but with a specific past, namely, the
legacies of communist regimes.
	 The case of the Polish lustration law is as specific as any other, but it is also
puzzling. Some may find it puzzling that the country that led the dismantling
of communism was the last to adopt a lustration law and that it adopted such
a “soft” one. How do we explain that in the country in which there was an
anti-communist organization (Solidarity) with ten million members — which
was then suppressed by martial law imposed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski
on December 13, 1981 — the new political forces did not implement any
decommunization measure? How do we explain the fact that a few years after
the transfer of power, a post-communist party won a majority in an election?
How do we explain that a former apparatchik and secretary of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party won a presidential election against the
legendary leader of Solidarity, Lech Wałe˛sa?
	 These are the most visible puzzles from political life; there are also questions
regarding other dimensions, such as economic life. Where have the multimillionaires
come from? How were they able to concentrate ownership of
state property so quickly? What is their political genealogy? And there are
questions regarding the moral dimension of social life. Why is public morality
at such a low level in a society that not long ago generated a mass social
movement such as Solidarity? How do we explain the erosion of the prestige
of public authorities? Why did the majority of society not participate in the
last democratic elections? Why is corruption so widespread?
	 These are important questions, but, one may ask, what do they have to do
with lustration? Although it is impossible to connect lustration to everything
that has gone wrong since 1989, lustration or its lack is very much connected
to the project of building a new type of society and polity. In other words, I
propose to look at lustration as a constitutional issue, as part of a broad spectrum
of policies and legal strategies for “settling accounts with the past,” as
part of the creation of the constitution of the new society.
	 Efforts to deal with the past are not unique to Central and Eastern Europe.
It is true that the past haunts this part of the world, due to its complicated history,
and most recently its communist history. As mentioned above, it is puzzling
that while all post-communist societies sooner or later were forced to
face their communist past, lustration and decommunization measures were
the “softest,” in terms of sanctions, in the countries that first broke with communism:
Poland and Hungary. One hypothesis is that because of the relatively
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large proportion of both nations’ populations engaged in the anti-communist
opposition, in comparison to other countries such as Czechoslovakia, there
was no need to provide additional legitimacy for the new political elites.
	 Lustration and decommunization in Poland became an issue when a real
struggle began for the future social and institutional structure of the country.
This shows that, contrary to the dominant perception, lustration and decommunization
are not backward looking but forward looking. It also shows that
lustration and decommunization were and are part of the political process
and political struggle. The peculiar character of the post-communist “negotiated
revolution,” using the term coined by Laszlo Bruszt, when all elements of
social life undergo radical change at the same time, represents a type of transformation
in which dealing with the past cannot be reduced to the question of
what to do about the “hangman.” The very problem of dealing with the past
in post-communist societies is not only about responding to gross violations
of human rights through retributive justice, compensation and restitution of
property, and truth telling. Lustration and decommunization became legal
tools in the rearrangement of the constitutional setting of society and state. In
the Polish case the lustration law became the main tool in the political struggle
because other avenues, such as decommunization, were blocked. Lustration
became a part of the pursuit of historical justice, but more importantly part
of the struggle over social justice, over the criteria and rules of redistribution
of the national product and national assets, when the losers in the economic
transformation, who not long before comprised the main force in fighting
against communism, discovered that the major beneficiaries of the transformation
were former nomenklatura and members of security apparatuses.
	 Before 1989 there was no articulation of any ideas regarding decommunization
or other ways of dealing with the functionaries of the communist
regime. Generally there were two groups with positions on the matter:
• radicals, who believed that the collapse of communism would result
from some sort of revolution and/or war and the problem would be
solved by revolutionary justice; and
• evolutionists, who believed in the evolution of the communist system
towards the incorporation of human rights and limited autonomy
with preservation of the dominant position of the Communist Party.
In this stream of political thought, there was no room even to entertain
the idea of dealing with the past.
The peculiar type of exit from communism in Poland, first through roundtable
talks and then the partly free election on June 4, 1989, revealed that even
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the communists were not conscious of the issue. They did not demand “sunset
clauses” or general amnesty. They did not take charge of and destroy the
files, as was the case in Chile where the archives of the special forces were
destroyed in order to make it impossible to hold functionaries accountable
before the courts in the future.
	 The so-called contract parliament, elected on June 4 and 18, 1989 (in two
rounds of voting), established an Extraordinary Parliamentary Commission
headed by the young deputy from the former anti-communist opposition, Jan
Maria Rokita, to examine the activity of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.42 The
aim of Rokita’s commission was to investigate the deaths of almost one hundred
people who died in unexplained circumstances but always in the context
of the activity of secret services or communist militia during the 1980s.
Nearly at the same time, another Extraordinary Parliamentary Commission
was established to deal with the decision on October 30, 1988, of the last
prime minister of the communist regime, Mieczysław Rakowski, to declare
the bankruptcy of the Gdansk shipyard, which was the cradle of the Solidarity
movement. It is possible to treat the work of this commission as a first step
in settling accounts for the economic catastrophe of the communist regime
in Poland.
	 After a celebrated article penned by Adam Michnik, entitled “Wasz prezydent,
nasz premier” (Your president, our prime minister), a domino effect
began. First came the creation of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government, but with
two important portfolios (internal affairs and defense) reserved for President
General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s people. Despite a relatively fast departure from
agreements achieved at the round-table talks (visible in the very act of creating
a government that did not include the communist party), progress in
decommunization has been very slow.
	 Another attempt at decommunization was the government’s effort to
determine the legal status of the property belonging to the Polish United
Worker’s Party (Communist Party). Weeks after the establishment of the
commission the party dismantled itself. The disappearance of one of the two
parties to the agreement achieved at the round-table talks accelerated political
change in the country. This does not mean, however, that Mazowiecki’s
government, which accepted a “thick-line” policy separating the past from the
present,43 was active in the process of decommunization. The government
was preoccupied with the economy, inflation, and foreign policy. At the same
time, the opposition movement started to fragment. Decommunization was
taken up by the Center Alliance [Porozumienie Centrum], organized by Jarosław
Kaczy´nski. One of the more interesting decommunization ideas circulated at
czarnota
250
this time of economic misery and high inflation in Poland was to impose a
special levy on all members of the former Communist Party.
	 On March 20, 1990, the government established a committee to examine
the archives of the Ministry for Internal Affairs. It was a reaction to information
in the media that some files in the archives were being destroyed by the
secret services. The establishment of the committee was not part of any holistic
concept of preservation of the legacy of the security apparatus, however,
but a response to the media’s claim. The still-dominant part of the new ruling
elite did not perceive the issue of dealing with the past.
	 In July 1990 a supplementary inquiry began regarding the brutal murder
of Reverend Jerzy Popiełuszko by SB officers on October 19, 1984, near Toru´n.
Then, in September of the same year, the prosecutor’s office of the armed
forces began an inquiry into the massacre of workers in Gda´nsk in December
1970. On November 9, 1990, the Parliament, by a small majority of 167 votes to
120, adopted a law on the assumption of the property of the former Communist
Party by the state treasury. As a symbolic act, one week later the building
that had housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party was turned
into bank offices, and became the location of the Warsaw stock exchange.
	 Despite this accelerated political change, manifested by the dismissal on
July 6, 1990, of two close associates of President Jaruzelski — General Florian
Siwicki as minister of defense and General Czesław Kiszczak as minister of
internal affairs — and the subsequent resignation of General Jaruzelski from
the office of the president, decommunization policies and legislative activities
progressed very slowly. This was not because of the government alone; public
opinion was deeply divided over the issue. According to a public opinion
survey conducted in November 1990, 42% of respondents supported a ban on
former communists holding public office, while 45.5% were against such policies.
In September 1991, 52% of respondents were against depriving the former
communists of the right to hold public office. It appears that at the beginning
of the period of economic austerity, a significant part of Polish society supported
the presence of communists in the new democratic polity.
	 An important measure of historical retributive justice came in the form of
a statute of April 4, 1991, which established “Stalinist crimes” as crimes committed
between 1939 and 1956 against ethnic Poles or against Polish citizens
of other ethnic origin. Stalinist crimes were not subject to the statute of limitations.
The same statute also established the main Commission for Inquiry
into Crimes against the Polish Nation, based on the former Commission for
Inquiry into Nazi Crimes, which stimulated new inquiries. Between 1991 and
1995 the commission initiated 950 new inquiries and completed 620. Despite
251
poland
the large number of inquiries, however, the courts received a very small number
of indictments. Prosecution was often abandoned for lack of satisfactory
documents and the impossibility of identifying perpetrators. If the trials actually
started, they were prolonged, to the frustration of former victims. For
instance, the trial of a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Public Security
between 1945 and 1954, Colonel Adam Humer, and his colleagues accused
of torture, only ended with a verdict at first instance after nearly three years
(September 1993 to March 1996). So far approximately twenty verdicts have
been reached.
	 A statute of February 23, 1991, focused on victims and annulled verdicts
passed between 1944 and 1956 for activity aimed at the independence of the
Polish state. This statute contained provisions for compensation for victims
of communist crimes. On August 25, 1998, another statute denied pension
privileges to judges and prosecutors who, between 1944 and 1956, were functionaries
of the apparatus of repression, that is, worked in the military administration
of justice, secret court divisions, or so-called ad hoc courts.
	 It has been, and to some extent remains, nearly impossible to apply criminal
justice in relation to crimes committed by communist state functionaries
after 1956, which do not fall into the category of Stalinist crimes. Trials in such
cases became possible with the adoption of the legal provision that the statute
of limitations for crimes committed by public functionaries prior to December
31, 1989, started on January 1, 1990. An additional statute of May 31, 1996,
forbidding the application of amnesties granted by the communist People’s
Republic of Poland for functionaries who committed crimes, eliminated any
doubts about the legal status of those crimes.
	 From the point of view of public opinion, however, these trials have been
very long and extremely slow. For instance, in the case of the members of the
Motorized Detachment of the Civic Militia [Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji
Obywatelskiej] (ZOMO) platoon, who took part in pacification of the Wujek
coal mine in which striking miners were killed, an indictment was filed with
the court in December 1992, fourteen months after the inquiry was closed. In
November 1997, six years after the beginning of the trial, the court found the
former functionaries not guilty. But this was not the end of the procedure;
there were appeals and the Supreme Court sent the matter back to the lower
court. The trials are still continuing.44 A sort of breakthrough occurred when
the former minister of internal affairs, General Czesław Kiszczak, was found
responsible on March 17, 2004, for the deaths of the miners. It was the first
time that a high functionary of the communist state was found guilty and
sentenced by the court.
czarnota
252
	 Similarly, the inquiry into the case of the massacres in December 1970 in
Gda´nsk began in October 1990, but an indictment was not filed with the court
until April 1995, and the trials started three years later due to the absence of
the accused. It is still ongoing.
	 A special case concerns the issue of the responsibility of General Wojciech
Jaruzelski for the implementation of martial law on December 13, 1981. Despite
the fact that Parliament declared the implementation of martial law illegal,
the procedure against General Jaruzelski before the parliamentary Committee
for Constitutional Responsibility was discontinued on February 13, 1996,
after four years of procedure. In April 2006 the prosecutor’s office presented
charges against General Jaruzelski in connection with this matter.
	 At the same time, the self-purification of state institutions was very slow
and minimal. With the reorganization of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
and dismantling of the SB, fourteen thousand out of twenty-four thousand
functionaries decided to undergo the verification procedure [weryfikacja], or
vetting procedure, required for readmission to the services45 (ten thousand
decided not to apply). Ten thousand applicants qualified for further employment,
and about four thousand became functionaries in the new State Security
Office [Urza˛d Ochrony Pan´stura] (UOP). The procedure was carried out by
qualification commissions, which were mandated to disqualify applicants
who, as functionaries of former intelligence or counterintelligence services in
the previous regime, had violated the law or the human rights or dignity of
other persons, or had used their position for private gain.
	 The qualification commissions operated at the voivodeship level and at the
central state level as appeals commissions. They were comprised of MPs,
senators, lawyers and representatives from police headquarters, members of
the Solidarity trade union, and other trustworthy citizens. Criticism of the
verification procedure came mainly from the former Communist Party in the
Sejm. The commissioner for citizens’ rights (ombudsman) at the time, Ewa
łe˛towska, also criticized the procedure for violating the human rights of the
former functionaries.46 After the completion of the verification procedure,
two-thirds of the operational staff of the newly established UOP came from
the pre-1989 Ministry of Internal Affairs. Many of the disqualified former
secret services operatives found employment in regular police forces and private
security agencies.
	 Regular police forces and military intelligence were not subjected to the
verification procedure. Military intelligence was reorganized and reduced in
size, but the entire process was not subject to any external control.
253
poland
	 Verification of public prosecutors was based on the evaluation of their
declarations of professional qualifications and activities. If the Ministry of Justice
found the declaration to be false, the prosecutor was not reappointed. In
1990, 10% of public prosecutors, that is 341 people, lost their jobs as a result of
national verification. In the office of the general prosecutor, 33% of the staff
lost their jobs.47 The process itself was quick and effective, but was criticized
by the post-communist party for breaching the rule of law. Following complaints
made to the commissioner for citizens’ rights concerning the lack of
an appeals mechanism, the Ministry of Justice set up a commission to review
appeals; it overturned decisions in forty-eight cases.
	 There is also the issue of access to secret police files. In 1992 Germany
became the first former communist country to open up secret police files to
citizens. Other post-communist countries followed and passed similar legislation,
such as Hungary in 1994 and Bulgaria in 1998. This was not possible
everywhere, however, from an economic and organizational point of view. In
Poland the issue was discussed only in 1997 in connection with a presidential
lustration law project in which it was suggested that a civic archive be established
within the framework of the state archives. In the wake of the September
1997 election, this idea was absorbed into the Law on the Institute of National
Remembrance [Ustawa o Instytucie Pamieci Narodowej], which was introduced
in July 2000. The law regulates access of interested persons to information
collected about them by the secret services between 1944 and 1989. In an
opinion poll conducted in December 1997, 73% of respondents supported the
view that each citizen should have access to his/her file, and 11% supported the
opposite opinion. Many interested citizens will not find a file on themselves
because the archives of the Office for the Protection of the State and then the
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration preserved only about three
million files on citizens. The Law on the Institute for National Remembrance
granted the prosecutor of the institute the same procedural rights as public
prosecutors. The institute started work on the communist period in Poland
and has begun to play an important role in the lustration process due to the
fact that all files are in its archives.
	 In this broad context of decommunization, lustration plays a peculiar and
crucial role. It can be said that transformation itself is decommunization. This
is true, but with the reservation that the post-communist structure is still in
the process of solidifying itself, and the networks of communist connections
influence public life mainly through their impact on the design and operation
of the new institutions. In this way, the interests of the former nomenklatura
czarnota
254
networks become embedded in the new political setting. This is why in the
Polish case lustration was and is a battlefront. Post-communist forces supported
it, but presented it as a normal clearance procedure as would exist in
any democratic country. Anti-communists saw it as a limited tool for undermining
a post-communist structure still controlled by the former nomenklatura
and secret services.
	 Since the parliamentary and presidential elections in November 2004,
there has been talk about broadening the scope of lustration to include other
professional groups, such as academics, as well as simplifying the procedure.
One development is a new process of scrutiny within the Catholic Church
in Poland — based on a sui generis lustration procedure. With the victory of
pro-lustration political parties and declarations by the new government that
it wants to change the law in order to broaden the process, it looks as if the
lustration odyssey is not finished yet, sixteen years after the beginning of the
transformation.
255
poland
Notes
1 	 See the final section of this chapter.
2 	 Wojciech Sadurski reconstructed the meaning of both categories in political discourse
in Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. He wrote “‘lustration’
applies to the screening of persons seeking to occupy (or actually occupying) certain
public positions for evidence of involvement with the communist regime (mainly with
the secret security apparatus), while ‘decommunisation’ refers to the exclusion of certain
categories of ex-Communist officials from the right to run for, and occupy, certain
public positions in the new system. However, in the public debate on the moral and
legal rationales for and against the policies covered by these concepts, the two have
been often lumped together.” Wojciech Sadurski, Rights Before Courts. A Study of Constitutional
Courts in Postcommunist States of Central and Eastern Europe (Dodrecht: Springer,
2005), 245. For further analysis of the decommunization issue in Poland, see Bronisław
Wildstein, Dekomunizacja której nie było (Kraków: O´srodek My´sli Politycznej i Ksie˛garnia
Akademicka, 2000).
3 	 The description of a political party as “post-communist” means that it existed in and
was part of the communist political system. A general typology within the Polish party
system is a division between post-communist parties and post-Solidarity parties. The
two main post-communist parties were the Democratic Left Alliance [Sojusz Lewicy
Demokratyczej] and the Polish Country Party [Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe].
4 	 For a detailed history of the debate about the lustration issue in Poland, see the recently
published book by Piotr Grzelak, Wojna o lustracje (War around lustration) (Warszawa:
Trio, 2005). For an overview of the main points of not only lustration but “dealing with
the past” in Poland, see Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe’s Democratic
Transition (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 92–131; on lustration, see 104–6 and 122–20.
5 	 For an example of the role of secret services in the communist society, see Ewa Matkowska,
System. Obywatel NRD pod nadzorem tajnych słuz˙b (Kraków: Arcana, 2003).
6 	 Józef Oleksy, when he was prime minister, was accused by Mielczanowski, at the time
the minister of internal affairs, of being an agent for the Soviet Union’s intelligence.
7 	 For more on the history of that department, with a staff of nineteen people led by
twenty-six-year-old Piotr Woyciechowski, see Michał Grocki, Konfidenci sa˛ w´sród nas. . .
(Warszawa: Editions Spotkania, 1993).
8 	 For a history of this drama in context, see Antoni Dudek, Pierwsze lata III RP 1989–2001
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo Arcana, 2002), 257–69.
9 	 After 1989 unified oppositional forces fragmented into many political parties and
movements. Parties that arose from the opposition and Solidarity are usually referred
to as being post-Solidarity. This does not mean that post-Solidarity parties share
the same ideology. They share only the same genealogy. Two liberal post-Solidarity
czarnota
256
parties were the Democratic Union [Unia Demokratycza], under the leadership of
Tadeusz Mazowiecki and with distinguished members such as Jacek Kuro´n, Adam
Michnik, and Bronisław Geremek; and, liberal in the economic sense, the Liberal-Democratic
Congress [Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny]. The differences were in policies but
were mainly generational. The Liberal-Democratic Congress was founded by a different
generation of anti-communist opposition.
10 	 For a fuller presentation of this position and an overview of the arguments, see Andrzej
Zybertowicz, W u´scisku tajnych słuz˙b. Upadek komunizmu i układ postnomenklaturowy
(Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Antyk, 1993); see also Maria Ło´s and Andrzej Zybertowicz,
Privatising the Police-State: the Case of Poland (London, New York: Palgrave, 2000).
11 	 Decision U.6/92 of June 19, 1992. For a description of context and comments, see Sadurski,
Rights Before Courts, 244.
12 	 Jan Olszewski was a lawyer and prominent member of the opposition movement. He
became prime minister after the 1991 election. His government was composed of rightof-center
parties, used strong anti-communist rhetoric, and promoted decommunization.
Olszewski’s government was from the very beginning in conflict with President
Lech Wałe˛sa. Wałe˛sa dismissed Olszewski’s government after the release of the socalled
Maciarewicz list, on which Wałe˛sa’s name was mentioned.
13 	 For an analysis of techniques used in the media to compromise lustration, see Radosław
Sojak, “Demaskowani i wykluczeni. Dyskurs antylustracyjny w Polsce w swietle socjologii
wiedzy,” Terazniejszo´s´c Czlowiek Edukacja, no. 2 (1998): 29–59.
14 	 See Annna Potocka-Hoser, “Spor o lustracje — komunikacja bez porozumienia,” Kultura
i Społecze´nstwo, no. 2 (1996): 163–182, 178.
15 	 For an overview of the main features of the four drafts, see the table on pages 199
and 200 in Ewa Bieniek, “Lustracja w krajach Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej,” in
Zagadnienia konstytucjonalizmu krajów Europy ´Srodkowo-Wschodniej, ed. Tadeusz Mołdawa
(Warszawa: Elipsa, 2003).
16 	 Before his successful presidential election, Kwa´sniewski was a leader of the postcommunist
party and before 1989 he was one of the secretaries of the Central Committee
of the Polish Communist Party [Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza] (PZPR).
17 	 Decision of the Constitutional Tribunal of October 21, 1998 [Wyrok Trybunału Konstytucyjnego
z dnia 21 pazdziernika 1998 r.] and Decision of the Constitutional Tribunal of
November 10, 1998 [Wyrok Trybunału Konstytucyjnego z dnia 10 listopada 1998 r.], Przegla˛d
Sejmowy, nr 6 (1988), 172.
18 	 The minority opinion criticized the amendment and wanted to invalidate the clause on
substantive not procedural grounds. For instance, the president of the Constitutional
Tribunal, Marek Safjan, argued in his dissenting opinion that the exemption of those
who did not endanger other people’s rights and freedoms would introduce highly
257
poland
vague and subjective criteria into the definition of collaboration that would lead to
inequality of treatment of the accused in the lustration procedure.
19 	 Cassation is a form of appeal. In the Polish lustration law there is a provision for normal
appeal to the higher Lustration Court and then in the form of cassation to the Supreme
Court.
20 	 See comments in Ius et Lex 1, no. 2 (2003): 489–520.
21 	 Wojewoda in Polish is a state administrator of the administrative unit of the state, województwo
(province).
22 	 Decision K.39/07, Orzecznictwo Trybunalu Konstytucyjnego at 518–19.
23 	 For an interpretation of the concept of public law, see Martin Loughlin, The Idea of Public
Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
24 	 Bogusław Nizie´nski, commissioner for the public interest, interview by author, conducted
in his office, Warsaw, Poland, November 20, 2002.
25 	 For the order of positions see article 7 of the lustration law at http://www.rzecznikip.
gov.pl/pprawna.htm.
26 	 Krzysztof Kauba and Bogusław Nizie´nski, “Lustracja,” in Ius et Lex. Ksiega Jubileuszowa
ku czci Profesora Adama Strzembosza, ed. Antoni De˛bi´nski, Alicja Grze´skowiak and
Krzysztof Wiak (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2002), 347.
27 	 Ibid.
28 	 Actually 25,453 lustration declarations were filed but 1,855 came from retired procurators
and judges who were not obliged to do so.
29 	 The latest figures available are from May 2004; see Bogusław Nizie´nski, “Polski model
lustracji” (paper delivered at the conference “Cienie pa´nstwa policyjnego, wokół teczek
bezpieki” at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toru´n, Poland, May 4, 2004) (on file with
author).
30 	 Statement of the Commissioner for Public Interest, Session 21 of the Sejm of the Polish
Republic, May 10, 2002 [Wysta˛pienie Rzecznika Interesu Publicznego Bogusława Nizie´nskiego
na 21 posiedzeniu Sejmu Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w dniu 10 maja 2002] (on file with author).
31 	 All this information is in the report delivered by the commissioner to Parliament. No
more recent data had been published by the commissioner’s office at the time of writing.
32 	 See Kauba and Nizie´nski, “Lustracja,” 348.
33 	 All data from “Excerpts from the information about activities of the Commissioner for
Public Interest in 2001, sent on February 19, 2002 to the President of Polish Republic,
Sejm, Senate, Prime Minister, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court” [Wyciag z Informacjii
o działalno´sci rzcznika Interesu Publicznego w 2001 r. Przesłanej w dniu 19 lutego 2002
do Prezydenta RP, Sejmu, Senatu, Prezesa Rady Ministrow oraz do I Prezesa Sa˛du Najwyz˙szego]
(on file with author). The largest number of cases was at the beginning of the lustration
procedure according to the provisions in the lustration law. After that only newcomers
to public life, limited in number, were obliged to make a lustration declaration.
34 	 Kauba and Nizienski, “Lustracja,” 345–49.
35 	 See article written during the stalemate by Leszek M. Hudala, “Ustawa Lustracyjna — 
i co dalej?,” Studia Iuridica 35 (1998): 171–91.
36 	 See Wojciech Sadurski, “Ustawa lustracyjna uzupłniona,” Rzeczpospolita, March 5, 1999.
37 	 For problems with dealing with past in the Polish system of the administration of justice,
see Maria Stanowska, “Próby rozliczenia z przeszło´scia˛w wymiarze sprawiedliwo´sci,”
in Ius et Lex. Ksiega Jubileuszowa ku czci Profesora Adama Strzembosza, ed. Antoni De˛bi´nski,
Alicja Grze´skowiak and Krzysztof Wiak (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2002), 301–37.
38 	 See Constitutional Tribunal ruling of May 20, 2002 (SK28/01).
39 	 See the history of lustration above.
40 	 Gazeta Wyborcza, February 3, 1997.
41 	 See summary information of the research under Komunikaty, Public Opinion Research
Center (CBOS).
42 	 See Jan Rokita, Raport Rokity. Sprawozdanie Sejmowej Komisji Nadzwyczajnej do Zbadania
Działano´sci MSW (Kraków: Arkana, 2005).
43 	 Mazowiecki, the first non-communist prime minister in the former communist world,
in his first speech to Parliament, used the expression gruba kreska (thick line) to separate
the communist past from the post-communist present and future. The expression
became synonymous with a policy of abandoning the attempt to make the former
communist ruling elite accountable for the excesses of the communist regime.
44 	 “Historia Wujka i procesu,” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 17, 2004.
45 	 Maria Ło´s, “Lustration and Truth Claims: Unfinished Revolution in Central Europe,”
Law and Social Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 122–23.
46 	 For information see “Vetting of the SB cadres,” in Ło´s and Zybertowicz, Privatising the
Police-State, 127–28.
47 	 Stanisław Podemski, “Lustracja zlustrowana,” Polityka, September 13, 1997, 17.
czarnota
258
460 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
Lustration and Lapse of Time:
‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
David Kosař*
Czech Lustration Acts: basic features – Among the most far-reaching in the postcommunist
countries in Europe – Challenges for the rule of law – 2001: Czech
Constitutional Court upholds their validity – Case-law of the European Court of
Human Rights – ‘Transition-to-democracy’ circumstances that justified their
adoption have ceased to exist
One of the most important challenges for the rule of law in the Czech Republic in
the period of transition has been the so-called lustration. The Czech lustration
consisted of two separate laws, the so-called ‘Large Lustration Act’1
and ‘Small
Lustration Act’.2
Throughout the paper I will use the term ‘Czech Lustration
Acts’ to refer to both of these Acts as they operate on the same principles, but the
focus of this paper is primarily on the ‘Large Lustration Act’.
Although the Czech Lustration Acts were initially adopted for five years, they
are still valid and as such subject to recurring political controversies even two
decades after the Velvet Revolution. In 2007, the former Prime Minister of the
European Constitutional Law Review, 4: 460–487, 2008
© 2008 T.M.C.ASSER PRESS and Contributors doi:10.1017/S1574019608004604
* Research and Documentation Department of the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech
Republic. E-mail: david.kosar@nssoud.cz. I am grateful to Adam Czarnota, Mark Gillis, Zdeněk
Kühn, Pavel Molek, Vojtěch Šimíček and Karel Šimka for extremely helpful comments and discussions.
I also thank Tom Eijsbouts, Jan-Herman Reestman and two anonymous reviewers for additional
comments that significantly improved the original manuscript. An earlier version of this paper
was published as the Eric Stein Working Paper No. 3/2008. All opinions expressed in this paper are
personal to the author (and not to the institution) and any mistake, of course, remains his own.
1 Act No. 451/1991 Coll., on standards required for holding specific positions in state administration
of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Czech Republic and Slovak Republic [Zákon č.
451/1991 Sb., kterým se stanoví některé další předpoklady pro výkon některých funkcí ve státních orgánech a
organizacích České a Slovenské Federativní Republiky, České republiky a Slovenské republiky] of 4 Oct. 1991.
2 Act No. 279/1992, on certain other prerequisites for the exercise of certain offices filled by
designation or appointment of members of the Police of the Czech Republic and members of the
Corrections Corps of the Czech Republic [Zákon č. 279/1992 Sb., o některých dalších předpokladech pro
výkon některých funkcí obsazovaných ustanovením nebo jmenováním příslušníků Policie České republiky a příslušníků
Vězeňské služby České republiky] of 28 April 1992.
461Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic,3
a top manager in the Czech Television (state television)4
and a
famous singer5
were accused of collaborating with the communist State Security
Police or of being a former member of the Peoples’ Militia. In 2008, the incomplete
files of the State Security Police and the speculations based thereon played a
seminal role in the heated presidential duel between the incumbent Václav Klaus
and his rival Jan Švejnar. Each camp attempted to denigrate its opponent by misusing
these files and the eventual victory of Václav Klaus was further tainted by
the accusation that the MP from the opposition party who cast a decisive vote for
Klaus was blackmailed by the threat of public revelation of his collaboration with
the State Security Police.6
These examples not only show the pain of ‘dealing with
the past’ in a post-communist regime, but also reveal clear deficiencies of the
Czech Lustration Acts themselves.
The Czech7
Lustration Acts are widely acknowledged to be ‘thorough and com-
prehensive’8
, ‘one of the strongest’9
and even ‘the most sweeping’10
among the
lustrations acts of the post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
As a result, they were met with fierce criticism, not only from foreign11
and Czech12
scholars, but also from dissidents themselves.13
However, it is not my intention to
3
See J. Kmenta, J. Vaca, ‘Tošovský spolupracoval s StB’ [Tošovský collaborated with State Security
Police], MF Dnes, 12 Feb. 2007, p. 4.
4 See J. Kubita, ‘Rada ČT podržela Janečka i bývalého milicionáře’ [the Council of Czech TV
supported Janeček as well as a former member of the militia], Hospodářské noviny, 22 Feb. 2007, p. 1
and 3.
5 See R. Malecký, ‘Nohavica a StB: nová fakta’ [Nohavica and State Security Police: new facts],
Lidové noviny, 10 Feb. 2007, p. 7.
6 A. Kottová, J. Jareš, ‘Spolupracoval Snítilý s StB?‘ [Did Snítilý collaborate with the StB?], Týden,
12 Feb. 2008, available at <http://www.tyden.cz/rubriky/domaci/boj-o-hrad/spolupracoval-snitilys-stb_43711.html>,
visited 17 Aug. 2008.
7 I do not refer to the lustration law as ‘Czechoslovak’ since it became a dead letter in Slovakia
after the split of Czechoslovakia. More precisely, the lustration laws lapsed by desuetude in Slovakia
due to the fact that no Ministry in Slovakia has been given authority to issue lustration certificates.
8 G. Skapska, ‘Moral Definitions of Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Facing Past
Human Rights Violations’, 18 International Sociology (2003) p. 199 at p. 202.
9 D. Robertson, ‘A Problem of Their Own, Solutions of Their Own: CEE Jurisdictions and
the Problems of Lustration and Retroactivity’, in W. Sadurski, et al. (eds.), Spreading Democracy and the
Rule of Law? The Impact of EU Enlargement on the Rule of Law, Democracy and Constitutionalism in PostCommunist
Legal Orders (Dordrecht, Springer 2006) p. 73 at p. 87.
10 H. Schwartz, ‘Lustration in Eastern Europe’, 1 Parker School Journal of East European Law
(1994) p. 141 at p. 142.
11 See id.; see also T. Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism (New
York, Vintage Books 1995).
12 See Z. Jičínský, V. Mikule, ‘Některé ústavněprávní otázky tzv. Lustračního zákona’ [Certain
Constitutional Questions Related to the So-called Lustration Law], 131 Právník (1992) p. 227.
13 See, e.g., the stance of Jiřina Šiklová and Václav Havel in J. Šiklová, ‘Lustration or the Czech
Way of Screening’, in M. Krygier and A.W. Czarnota (eds.), The Rule of Law after Communism: Problems
462 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
question the legitimacy of the introduction of the Lustration Acts in the early
1990’s. I presume that (1) the Czechoslovak Parliament immediately after the Velvet
Revolution enjoyed legitimacy to adopt the selective lustration laws;14
(2) the most
excessive aspects of these laws were remedied by the Constitutional Court of the
Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (hereafter, Federal Court)15
and the Czech
Constitutional Court;16
and that (3) the departure from the rule-of-law principles
in 1995 and 2000 when the Czech Parliament extended the validity of both
lustration laws17
wasstill justified by the unique circumstances of the transition to
democracy in the Czech Republic.
But this presumption does not prevent us from asking whether the Czech
Lustration Acts are constitutional today. This question becomes even more pertinent
due to recent case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter,
ECtHR). The core of this paper thus focuses on the phenomenon of ‘lapse of
time’ and screens the Czech Lustration Acts against the contemporary jurisprudence
of the ECtHR. Although according to the ECtHR’s jurisprudence as it
stands now the Czech Lustration Acts do not necessarily violate the European
Convention on Human Rights (hereafter, ECHR or Convention), I argue that
they violate the Czech Charter of Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms (hereafter,
Charter),18
since the ‘transition-to-democracy’ circumstances that justified
their adoption have ceased to exist. Therefore, they should either be repealed by
the Parliament or annulled by the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic.
In the following, the basic features of the Czech Lustration Acts are outlined,
after which the recent case-law of the ECtHR is analysed. Subsequently, the Czech
Lustration Acts are scrutinised in the light of the ECtHR’s jurisprudence. Finally
the conformity of this law with the Charter is reviewed.
and Prospects in East-Central Europe (Aldershot, Ashgate 1999) p. 248-258. Note also that then-President
Václav Havel vetoed the extension of the time limit in the lustration laws both in 1995 and
2000 (see infra). Another famous Czech dissident, Petr Uhl, was even the main representative of the
petitioners before the Constitutional Court of the Czechoslovak Federal Republic in the Lustration
I case (see infra).
14 See M. Gillis, ‘Lustration and Decommunisation’, in J. Přibáň and J. Young (eds.), The Rule of
Law in Central Europe: The Reconstruction of Legality, Constitutionalism and Civil Society in the Post-Communist
Countries (Aldershot, Ashgate 1999) p. 59-66.
15 Decision of the Federal Court No. Pl. 03/92 of 26 Nov. 1992 (Lustration I), available in
English at <http://angl.concourt.cz/angl_verze/cases.php>, visited 17 Aug. 2008. Note that the
Federal Court was established in 1991, started to work in 1992 and had come to an end due to the
dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic on 31 Dec. 1992.
16 Decision of the Czech Constitutional Court No. Pl. 09/01 of 5 Dec. 2001 (Lustration II),
available in English at <http://angl.concourt.cz/angl_verze/cases.php>, visited 17 Aug. 2008.
17 See infra.
18 Act No. 2/1993 Coll. of 16 Dec. 1992.
463Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
Basic features of the Czech Lustration Acts
While the international scholarly literature devotes attention almost exclusively to
the Large Lustration Act, the Czech Law knows two Lustration Acts.19
Lack of
awareness of the Small Lustration Act can be explained by the fact that only the
Large Lustration Act was challenged before the Federal Court.20
For this reason,
this paper also focuses primarily on the Large Lustration Act. It is important to
note, however, that both Lustration Acts should be read in conjunction. In fact,
the second challenge to lustration, the first before the Czech Constitutional Court,
was aimed at both Acts and was partly successful in challenging the Small Lustration
Act.21
‘Protected’ and ‘suspect’ positions in the Large Lustration Act
The Large Lustration Act includes two lists, the so-called ‘protected positions’ on
the one hand and the ‘suspect positions’ on the other.22
The first label refers to
the public offices23
for which a negative lustration certificate is required. Thus,
persons falling into one of the categories in the list of ‘suspect positions’ are
barred from holding these positions. The second label covers the offices or activities
held during the communist regime that disqualify its holder from working in
capacities included in the ‘protected positions’. In other words, the ‘suspect positions’
list stipulates ‘who is disqualified’ whereas the ‘protected positions’ list specifies
‘which positions he is disqualified from’.
The ‘protected positions’ include, inter alia, all those filled by election, nomination,
or appointment in bodies of state administration,24
the army, security service,
and police force, the staff working in the offices of the President, Government,
Parliament, courts, state radio and television, and in the state-owned companies.25
However, in contrast to Poland, the Large Lustration Act does not apply to positions
for which individuals are elected by democratic vote. Therefore, MPs, senators
and elected municipal authorities do not fall within the scope of the ‘protected
19 See supra nn. 1 and 2.
20 Pl. 03/92 Lustration I. In fact, the Small Lustration Act did not exist at that time.
21 Pl. 09/01 Lustration II.
22 Gillis, supra n. 14, at p. 56.
23 The term ‘public offices’ is understood broadly here and encompasses all forms of public
employment including high-ranking positions in the state-owned companies, universities and state
media.
24 The term ‘state administration’ in the Czech Republic refers only to civil servants and does
not cover democratically elected functions (see infra).
25 Art. 1(1) of the Large Lustration Act.
464 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
positions’.26
Put differently, ‘democratic legitimacy took precedence over lustration
procedures.’27
The ‘suspect positions’28
include, inter alia, high ranking positions in the Communist
Party, members of the ‘Peoples’ Militia’,29
various offices related to the
State Security Police30
and informers of State Security Police.31
Conversely, the
ordinary members of the Communist Party (in contrast to its officials) are outside the
scope of the Act.32
The original text of the Large Lustration Act included also a
highly controversial group of ‘candidates for collaboration’,33
but inclusion of
this group was – rightly – declared unconstitutional by the Federal Court.34
However,
this correction has not saved the Large Lustration Act from being labelled as
‘striking’ for allegedly giving priority to dealing with informers and collaborators instead
of prosecuting and punishing perpetrators.35
26
See J. Přibáň, ‘Constitutional Justice and Retroactivity of Laws in Postcommunist Central
Europe’, in J. Přibáň, et al. (eds.), Systems of Justice in Transition: Central European Experiences since 1989
(Aldershot, Ashgate 2003), p. 29 at p. 42, and the sources cited therein.
27
Id.
28
Art. 2(1) of the Large Lustration Act.
29 People’s Militias (in Czech ‘Lidové milice’, in Slovak ‘Ľudové milície’) was a paramilitary organisation
of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia during 1948-1989.
30 The State Security Police was organisation analogous to the KGB in the USSR, i.e., a secret
police force which was controlled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
31 The category of the informers was divided into three subcategories: category A of ‘agents,
informers, and owners of conspiratorial flats’; category B of ‘trustees’, who, though not classified
by any of the activities listed in category A, were conscious collaborators; and category C, ‘candidates
for collaboration’ (see infra). Categories A and B are defined in Art. 2(1)(b) of the Large Lustration
Act, whereas category C was stipulated in Art. 2(1)(c) of this Act.
32 See Přibáň 2003, supra n. 26, at p. 42, and the sources cited therein.
33 Art. 2(1)(c) of the Large Lustration Act (before the Lustration I decision). ‘Candidates for
collaboration’ were persons who had been contacted and interrogated by the State Security Police
and listed as potential confidants but who were not necessarily active collaborators (as they were
listed even though they declined to collaborate).
34 Pl. 03/92 Lustration I.
35 A. Du Toit, ‘The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC: Truth as Acknowledgment
and Justice as Recognition’, in D. Thompson and R.I. Rotberg (eds.), Truth v. Justice: The Morality of
Truth Commissions (Princeton, Princeton University Press 2000), p. 127 [emphasis in original]. Du
Toit is right since the Czech Lustration Acts have primarily affected those whose collaboration was
disputable, whereas the worst perpetrators silently left their public offices and moved to more lucrative
positions in emerging business areas, where they could sell their good contacts (Šiklová, supra
n. 13, at p. 250). Instead of punishing perpetrators the positive lustration certificates have ruined
the lives of hundreds of ‘innocent’ persons (innocent in a sense that they were not any more complicit
with the Communist regime than the rest of the population); see J. Kavan, ‘The Development of
Rights of Access to the Media: the Role of Media in Lustration’, in A. Sajó and M. Price (eds.), Rights
of Access to the Media (The Hague, Kluwer Law International 1996), p. 259 at p. 277-278.
465Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
How does the Large Lustration Act operate?
The practical application of the Large Lustration Act is three-fold: (1) the candidates
for ‘protected positions’ are screened; (2) positively lustrated candidates are
barred from holding ‘protected positions’; and (3) positively lustrated individuals
who already hold a ‘protected position’ are removed from them.36
The lustration
certificates are issued by the Ministry of the Interior and these certificates, unlike
those provided by the Gauck Office in Germany, have the effect of administrative
decisions with direct consequences for the person being screened.37
Furthermore,
there are no exoneration grounds available and the few exceptions38
the Large
Lustration Act originally contained were annulled by the Federal Court in 1992 for
a violation of the principle of equality enshrined in Article 1 of the Charter.39
Therefore, ‘those who fall into the “suspect positions” ... are automatically excluded
or removed from the “protected position”.’40
As a result, the Czech Lustration
Acts lack any form of individualisation.
Another important feature of the Czech Lustration Acts was their temporality.
At the time of enactment, the Czech Lustration Acts were considered to be ‘a
provisional and only temporary legal method for protecting the new democratic
regime.’41
The Act was adopted in October 1991 initially for five years. In 199542
Parliament extended its validity for a further five years and in 2000 it repealed the
time limitation altogether.43
It is also worthy of mention that President Václav
Havel vetoed the extension of the time limit both in 1995 and 2000 and returned
the amendment to Parliament, arguing that ‘the Act was only relevant for the “revolutionary
phase”, and that it was time to introduce normal rule-of-law conditions,
which could permit no trace of collective guilt.’44
However, Parliament in both
cases disagreed with Havel and overrode his veto. More recently, when the Prime
36 J. Meierhenrich, ‘The Ethics of Lustration,’ 20 Ethics and International Affairs (2006) p. 99 at
p. 99.
37 Přibáň 2003, supra n. 26, at p. 45.
38 Arts. 2(3) and 3(2) of the Large Lustration Act (before the Lustration I decision) gave discretion
to the Minister of Defence and Minister of the Interior to pardon members of the State
Security Police for reasons of national security and ‘opt them out’ from the ‘suspect positions’.
39 Art. 1 of the Charter reads as follows: ‘All people are free, have equal dignity, and enjoy
equality of rights….’ [author’s translation]
40 Gillis, supra n. 14, at p. 57.
41 Přibáň 2003, supra n. 26, at p. 42.
42 Act No. 254/1995 Coll., which amends the Large Lustration Act, of 27 Sept. 1995; and Act
No. 256/1995 Coll., which amends the Small Lustration Act, of 27 Sept. 1995.
43 Czech Republic, Act No. 422/2000 Coll., which amends the Large Lustration Act, of 25 Oct.
2000; and Czech Republic, Act No. 424/2000 Coll., which amends the Small Lustration Act, of
25 Oct. 2000.
44 Šiklová, supra n. 13, at p. 252.
466 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
Minister (of the Czech Social Democrats) suggested the annulment of the
Lustration Acts in 2005 he was met with staunch criticism from his colleagues and
the media, who accused him of preparing the ground for a Government coalition
with the Communist Party.
The Small Lustration Act
As to the Small Lustration Act, its structure, operation and (initial) temporal nature
mirror the Large Lustration Act. It differs only in two major aspects. First,
the ‘protected positions’ are specific to the rationae materiae of the Small Lustration
Act and include high-ranking positions within the Police of the Czech Republic
and several positions at the Ministry of the Interior. Secondly, the ‘suspect positions’
differ slightly from those in the Large Lustration Act, in particular for (potential)
holders of a position within the ‘Correctional Corps’ of the Czech
Republic.45
Constitutional lustration adjudication in the Czech Republic
Both the Large Lustration Act in its original wording, and the amendments repealing
the time limit of the Czech Lustration Acts were challenged before the
Federal Court and the Czech Constitutional Court respectively. As a result, both
constitutional courts were obliged to address the ‘lapse of time’ phenomenon.
In the first decision, the so called Lustration I case,46
the Federal Court stressed
two crucial factors for the outcome of the case. First, it spelled out its perception
of the material Rechtsstaat, which is generally considered a core of the decision:47
In contrast to the totalitarian system, which was founded on the basis of the goals
of the moment and was never bound by legal principles, much less principles of
constitutional law, a democratic state proceeds from quite different values and cri-
teria.
(…)
Each state, or rather those which were compelled over a period of forty years to
endure the violation of fundamental rights and basic freedoms by a totalitarian regime,
has the right to [en]throne democratic leadership and to apply such legal
45 Art. 5 of the Small Lustration Act. The ‘Correctional Corps’ in Communist Czechoslovakia
consisted of prison guards who acted as an extended arm of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
and often brutally interrogated the opponents of the Communist regime.
46 Pl. 03/92 Lustration I.
47 Cf. Z. Kühn, ‘České lustrační rozhodnutí – role srovnávacího práva a nedostatky v soudcovské
argumentaci’ [The Czech Lustration Decision – the Role of Comparative Law and the Deficiency
of Judicial Argumentation], in O. Novotný (ed.), Pocta Vladimíru Mikule k 65. Narozeninám (Praha,
ASPI Publishing 2002) p. 361 at p. 369.
467Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
measures as are apt to avert the risk of subversion or of a possible relapse into
totalitarianism, or at least to limit those risks.
(…)
As one of the basic concepts and requirements of a law-based state, legal certainty
must, therefore, consist [of] certainty with regard to its substantive values. Thus,
the contemporary construction of a law-based state, which has for its starting
point a discontinuity with the totalitarian regime as concerns values, may not
adopt [...] criteria of formal-legal and material-legal continuity which is based on a
differing value system, not even under the circumstances that the formal normative
continuity of the legal order makes it possible. Respect for continuity with the
old value system would not be a guarantee of legal certainty but, on the contrary,
by calling into question the values of the new system, legal certainty would be
threatened in society and eventually the citizens’ faith in the credibility of the
democratic system would be shaken.48
Next to the material Rechtsstaat reasoning, the Federal Court relied heavily on the
temporary nature of the Large Lustration Act and noticed that it ‘shall apply only
during a relatively short time period by the end of which it is foreseen that the process
of democratisation will have been accomplished (by 31 December 1996).’49
This
two-fold reasoning left many questions unresolved. Most importantly, until the
Lustration II case50
it was not clear whether these two conditions operate separately
or cumulatively, and whether the process of democratization is limited by a
specific deadline or tied to the accomplishment of a specific aim.
In fact, the petitioners who in 2000 challenged the repeal of the time limitation
of both Lustration Acts in the Lustration II case raised this issue and argued that as
the time limitation of the Lustration Acts was repealed, the Acts failed to meet the
conditions of constitutionality.51
In other words, they asserted that the ‘material
Rechtsstaat’ condition and the ‘temporary nature’ condition must be fulfilled cumulatively.
The Czech Constitutional Court rejected this argument.52
While it
acknowledged the importance of the time factor, it also held that the ‘short-timeperiod’
argument in Lustration I was not the only justification for upholding the
48 Unofficial translation of the Federal Court, available at <http://angl.concourt.cz/angl_verze/
cases.php>, visited 17 Aug. 2008
49 Id. [emphasis added].
50 Pl. 09/01 Lustration II.
51 The petitioners relied on Art. 1 of the Constitution (principle of rule of law), Arts. 1 (principle
of equality), 4 § 2 and § 4 (protection of the core of the fundamental rights) and Art. 21 § 4
(right to access under equal conditions to elected and other public offices) of the Charter, Art. 4 of
the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Labour
Organization’s Convention on Discrimination (Employment and Profession) of 1958 (No. 111).
52 This paper leaves aside a lengthy elaboration on the relationship between the Federal Court
and the Czech Constitutional Court with regards to the concept of res iudicata.
468 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
constitutionality of the Large Lustration Act in 1992. In other words, the Court
decided that the ‘material Rechtsstaat’ argument and the ‘temporary nature’ argument
apply separately and departure from the short time nature of the Lustration
Acts does not in itself make these acts unconstitutional.
This was not the end of the story. The Czech Constitutional Court still had to
decide whether the conditions for constitutionality of the Lustration Acts indeed
existed eleven years after the Velvet Revolution. It approached this issue diligently,
but it was clear from its reasoning that it was highly reluctant to ‘overrule’ the
conclusions of the Federal Court in Lustration I. More specifically, it invoked the
concept of a ‘democracy capable of defending itself’53
and left the decision to
the legislature as to whether the Lustration Acts were still necessary.54
One commentator
found this part of the Court’s reasoning so deferential that he referred
to it as ‘a form of “political question doctrine”.’55
But this is exaggerated. Even
though the Court seemed to have shied away from annulling the Czech Lustration
Acts for ‘a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards’,56
given other
factors57
it is more appropriate to say that the Czech Constitutional Court exer-
53
This concept of German origin (referred to as wehrhafte or streitbare Demokratie) empowers the
democratic State to take measures to prevent the (re)occurence of the totalitarian regime and to
curtail the rights of those who advocate for such regime. In the lustration context, it means that the
State is entitled to require civil servants to be loyal to the constitutional principles on which it is
founded. See supra excerpt from the Lustration I decision; cf. D. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence
of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2nd edn. (Durham, Duke University Press 1997), at p. 37-38
and 217-237; A. Sajó (ed.), Militant Democracy (Utrecht, Eleven International Publishing 2004); and
ECtHR 26 Sept. 1995, Case No. 17851/91, Vogt v. Germany, §§ 54-59; ECtHR 16 March 2006, Case
No. 58278/00, Ždanoka v. Latvia [GC], § 100; and ECtHR 13 Feb. 2003, Cases Nos. 41340/98,
41342/98, 41343/98 and 41344/98, Refah Partisi (the Welfare Party) and Others v. Turkey [GC], § 99.
54 The relevant part of the reasoning of the Czech Constitutional Court reads as follows: ‘The
petition … brings many data which convincingly document that the development of democratic
changes after 1992 is stormy and that … the “democratic process culminated.” Nonetheless, the …
Court considers it necessary to add to these data that determination of the degree of development
of democracy in a particular state is a social and political question, not a constitutional law question.
Thus, the … Court is not able to review the claim of “culmination” or, on the contrary “nonculmination”
of the democratic process by the means which it has at its disposal ... However, it can
… confirm that the public interest resting in the state’s needs during the period of transition from
totalitarianism to democracy have declined in intensity and urgency since 1992.’ (Pl. 09/01 Lustration
II, unofficial translation, available at <http://angl.concourt.cz/angl_verze/cases.php>, visited 17
Aug. 2008)
55 Robertson, supra n. 9, at p. 89.
56 Baker v. Carr, 369 US 186, at 217 (1962).
57 Since there is no such concept as the ‘political question doctrine’ in Czech constitutional law,
since the Charter contains a justiciable right to access under equal conditions to public offices (Art.
21 § 4) and since the Court struggled to provide further rationale for its position and left room for
future challenges.
469Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
cised a significant self-restraint and gave a broad discretion to the legislator.58
It
simply lacked enough evidence (both empirical and juridical) to generate the constitutional
legitimacy necessary to counter predominant political views at the time
when the Lustration II decision was taken.59
As David Robertson rightly observed, the
‘world was judged not to have changed enough’ to rebut other arguments in support
of lustration endorsed by the Federal Court in 1992.60
Finally, the Czech Constitutional Court also engaged in a comparative analysis
of the other lustration acts in the CEE region, which was met with scathing criticism
for its selectivity, shallowness61
and manipulation of the facts.62
More interesting
for the purpose of this paper is that the Court also noted that since ‘no
international court has yet issued a decision in the question of the compliance of
lustration acts with international agreements, the [Czech Constitutional Court will]
... use other ... indicators.’63
Therefore, we can reasonably infer that the Czech
Constitutional Court is prepared to reconsider the Lustration I and II rulings in the
light of non-conformity judgments of international courts. Here the jurisprudence
of the ECtHR comes into play.
Before this paper proceeds to the analysis of the jurisprudence of the ECtHR
on lustration and decommunisation, it will briefly outline the main grounds of
criticism of the Czech Lustration Acts and their unique features. This outline is
meant to put the Czech lustration law into a broader perspective within the CEE
region and prepare the ground for distinguishing the Czech Acts from the other
lustration acts that have already been challenged before the ECtHR.64
58 For a German position vis-à-vis the ‘political question doctrine’ which is roughly similar to the
Czech one, cf. D. Kommers, supra n. 53, at p. 153-164; or T.M. Franck, Political Questions/Judicial
Answers: Does the Rule of Law Apply to Foreign Affairs? (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1992), at
p. 107-125. On how the self-restraint and deference may operate within the test of proportionality,
cf. J. Rivers, ‘Proportionality and Variable Intensity of Review’, 65 Cambridge Law Journal (2006), p.
174 at p. 195-207.
59 Cf. R. Uitz, ‘Constitutional Courts in Central and Eastern Europe: What Makes a Question
Too Political’, XIII Juridica International (2007) p. 47 at p. 53.
60 Robertson, supra n. 9, at p. 89.
61 The Czech Constitutional Court cited in support of its conclusion among others Adler v.
Board of Education, 342 US 485 (1952), a rather outdated case, and, what is more, a precedent which
was overruled only 15 years later by Keyishian v. Board Of Regents, 385 US 589 (1967). See Kühn, supra
n. 47, at p. 376.
62 Kühn, supra n. 47, at p. 376.
63 Lustration II, § IX [emphasis added].
64 For this reason. I will not contrast the Czech Lustration Acts with those lustration laws (such
as the Hungarian Lustration Act of 1994) that have not been challenged before the ECtHR so far.
470 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
Specificities of the Czech Lustration Acts and main grounds of its criticism
As mentioned earlier, the Czech Lustration Acts have been met with sharp criticism
since the very beginning of their existence. It is helpful to summarise briefly
the grounds of this criticism. Since 1991, the following deficiencies of the Czech
Lustration Acts have been raised: (1) it is overinclusive and at the same time
underinclusive, as will be explained later on;65
(2) it legalises collective guilt;66
(3)
it applies the presumption of guilt instead of innocence;67
(4) it does not take into
account individual circumstances of a particular case;68
(5) it violates the principle
of equality before the law;69
(6) the State Security Police files are inaccurate and
incomplete,70
which ‘often benefits individuals who may have dubious pasts but
keep good contacts with communist secret police officers who now willingly testify
in their favour before the courts;’71
and (7) lustration has been abused for
political motives and has led to witch hunts.72
These deficiencies also pinpoint the main characteristics of the Czech Lustration
Acts that distinguishes them from their counterparts in Central and Eastern Eu-
rope.73
First, in contrast to most of the lustration acts in the region, the Czech
Lustration Acts after the 2000 amendments do not contain a time limit. Secondly,
unlike in Poland74
or Lithuania,75
they foreclose the positively76
lustrated persons
from holding the ‘protected positions’ indefinitely.
65 Šiklová, supra n. 13, at p. 254-55; Du Toit, supra n. 35, at p. 127.
66 Schwartz, supra n. 10, at p. 142.
67 Václav Havel (quoted in: Šiklová, supra n. 13, at p. 249). See Kühn, supra n. 47, at p. 367.
68 Kühn, supra n. 47, at p. 376; arguing a contrario ECtHR 26 Sept. 1995, Case No. 17851/91,
Vogt v. Germany, § 55.
69 See F. Šamalík, ‘Lustrace “lustračního zákona”’ [The Lustration of ‘the Lustration Law’], Časopis
pro právní vědu a praxi, No. 3 (1994), p. 21.
70 Skapska, supra n. 8, at p. 210.
71 J. Přibáň, ‘Oppressors and Their Victims: The Czech Lustration Law and the Rule of Law’, in
A. Mayer-Rieckh and P. de Greiff (eds.), Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional
Societies (New York, SSRN 2007) p. 309 at p. 336-337 (available also online at <http://www.ssrc.org/
blogs/books/2007/05/08/justice-as-prevention/>, visited 17 Aug. 2008).
72 See Rosenberg, supra n. 11; and Uitz, supra n. 59, at p. 53.
73 There is a growing body of literature that rightly observes that a particular type of lustration
selected in each post-communist country reflects its mode of transition and contrast ‘round-tabletalks
scenario’ in Hungary and Poland with the ‘revolutionary scenario’ in the Czech Republic and
East Germany; see, e.g., S. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
(Norman, University of Oklahoma Press 1991) p. 228; or more recently A. Mayer-Rieckh and P. de
Greiff (eds.), supra n. 71. However, this issue is beyond the scope of this paper.
74 Where the persons can be barred from holding certain positions ‘only’ for 10 years. See Law
on disclosing work for or service in the State’s security services or collaboration with them between
1944 and 1990 by persons exercising public functions [Ustawa z 11 kwietnia 1997 o ujawnieniu
pracy lub służby w organach bezpieczeństwa państwa lub współpracy z nimi w latach 1944-1990
osób pełniących funkcje publiczne] of 11 April 1997 (hereafter, 1997 Polish Lustration Act), sec.
30. Note that the 1997 Polish Lustration Act lost its binding force on 15 March 2007.
471Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
Thirdly, they do not contain any exoneration grounds for those who were intimidated
and forced to collaborate or those who were enlisted only for a very
short period of time. Similarly, and again unlike in Poland,77
the Czech Lustration
Acts bar the positively lustrated persons from holding the ‘protected positions’
even if they explicitly acknowledged that they held one of the other ‘suspect positions’
during the communist regime (e.g., their collaboration with State Security
Police).
Fourthly, it is applicable both to the candidates for ‘protected position’ and
those who are already holding this position. And, finally, the Czech Lustration
Acts are generally considered to be very broad as to the ‘suspect’ and ‘protected’
positions, and they lack effective remedies against the accusation of being a collaborator
with the former regime.78
These specifics of the Czech Lustration Acts
led foreign commentators to the labelling mentioned in the introduction.
On the other hand, it is necessary to overcome myths about the ‘sweepingness’
of the Czech Lustration Acts. While it can still be reasonably argued that the Czech
Lustration Acts are overall ‘the most sweeping’, they are definitely not ‘the most
sweeping’ in all aspects. For instance, the crucial distinction from the 1997 Polish
Lustration Act lies in the fact that the Czech Lustration Acts do not apply at all to
positions for which individuals are democratically elected. As I will argue below,
there is a world of difference between the right to stand in the elections and the
right to access to positions in the public service. Similarly, ‘protected positions’ in
the Lithuanian KGB Act and 1997 Polish Lustration Act were much broader,
since they included certain private sector jobs, which were, moreover, often framed
in an ambiguous manner.79
75 Law on the Evaluation of the USSR State Security Committee (NKVD, NKGB, MGB, KGB)
and the Present Activities of Permanent Employees of the Organisation [Istatymas de.
l SSRS valstybe.
s
saugumo komiteto (NKVD, NKGB, MGB, KGB) vertinimo šios organizacijos kadriniu darbuotoju dabartine.
s
veiklos] of 16 July 1998 (hereafter, Lithuanian KGB Act), sec. 2.
76 According to the Czech lustration terminology, ‘positively lustrated person’ (and, analogously,
‘positive lustration certificate’) refers to a person who falls within the ‘suspect positions’. This may
create certain confusion when reading ECtHR’s cases since the ECtHR sometimes uses the term
‘negative security clearance’ to refer to the same group. See, e.g., ECtHR 14 Feb. 2006, Case No.
57986/00, Turek v. Slovakia, §§ 11, 79, 83, 88, 91, 100-101, 110 and 117.
77 The 1997 Polish Lustration Act obliged persons exercising public functions in Poland to
disclose whether they had worked for or collaborated with the State’s security services between
1944 and 1990. If a person discloses their collaboration, they are no longer barred from holding a
‘protected position.’
78 See, e.g., Kühn, supra n. 47, at p. 378.
79 With regards to Lithuania, see Lithuanian KGB Act, sec. 2; and analysis of Sidabras and Džiautas
v. Lithuania infra. As to Poland, see 1997 Polish Lustration Act (as amended in 1998), sec. 7 (1) item
10 (a); and analysis of Bobek v. Poland infra.
472 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
Furthermore, in contrast to Lithuania, the Czech Lustration Acts were adopted
immediately after the Velvet Revolution, which buttresses its legitimacy. And finally,
from the practical point of view, although the Czech Lustration Acts are one
of the most long-lasting lustration statutes, they have never been directly challenged
before the ECtHR by a Czech national.80
This finding is surprising since,
for instance in comparison with Poland, the Czech Lustration Acts seem to interfere
more with the human rights of those who were ‘positively lustrated’.
Recent jurisprudence of the ECtHR
Although the European Commission of Human Rights spelled out the argument
of ‘transition-to-democracy’ as early as 1989,81
the ECtHR has applied this argument
rather seldom.82
This does not, of course, mean that the cases with an element
of ‘dealing with the past’ do not come before the ECtHR. On the contrary,
there has been a significant case-load coming predominantly from the post-communist
countries on a variety of ‘transitional justice’ issues, such as restitution,83
rent (de)regulation,84
conversion of money after German reunification,85
or citizenship
issues.86
But this was not the case with lustration. Only in 2004 did the ECtHR give its
first lustration judgment on the merits, in a case against Lithuania.87
Since 2004
80 Note that there was a challenge on the basis of the Large Lustration Act from Slovakia; see
discussion on Turek v. Slovakia infra and European Commission of Human Rights, 28 June 1995,
Case No. 24157/94, Matejka v. Slovakia (dec.).
81 European Commission of Human Rights, 7 Nov. 1989, Case No. 11798/85, Castells v. Spain
(dec.). See also reflection of this argument in the Joint dissenting opinion of judges Frowein and Hall
(§ 2) and Dissenting opinion of judge Martínez (§§ 15-16) in the merits stage (European Commission
of Human Rights, 8 Jan. 1991, Case No. 11798/85, Castells v. Spain).
82 Apart from lustration cases discussed infra, see, e.g., ECtHR 26 Oct. 2000, Case No. 30985/
96, Hasan and Chaush v. Bulgaria [GC]; ECtHR 13 Feb. 2003, Cases Nos. 41340/98, 41342/98,
41343/98 and 41344/98, Refah Partisi (the Welfare Party) and Others v. Turkey [GC]; ECtHR 22 March
2001, Cases Nos. 34044/96, 35532/97 and 44801/98, Streletz, Kessler and Krenz v. Germany [GC];
ECtHR 14 Feb. 2006, Case No. 57986/00, Turek v. Slovakia; ECtHR 16 March 2006, Case No.
58278/00, Ždanoka v. Latvia [GC]; ECtHR 15 March 2007, Cases Nos. 43278/98 and others, Velikovi
and Others v. Bulgaria; or ECtHR 8 July 2008, Case No. 33629/06, Vajnai v. Hungary.
83 See, e.g., ECtHR 2 March 2005, Cases Nos. 71916/01, 71917/01 and 10260/02, Maltzan and
Others v. Germany (dec.) [GC]; ECtHR 13 Dec. 2000, Case No. 33071/96, Malhous v. the Czech Republic
(dec.) [GC]; or ECtHR 13 Dec. 2005, Case No. 17120/04, Bergauer and Others v. the Czech Republic
(dec.).
84 ECtHR 19 June 2006, Case No. 35014/97, Hutten-Czapska v. Poland [GC].
85 ECtHR 15 Nov. 2001, Cases Nos. 53991/00 and 54999/00, Honecker and Others v. Germany
(dec.).
86 ECtHR 9 Oct. 2003, Case No. 48321/99, Slivenko v. Latvia [GC].
87 ECtHR 27 July 2004, Cases Nos. 55480/00 and 59330/00, Sidabras and Džiautas v. Lithuania.
473Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
one more Lithuanian,88
one Slovak,89
one Latvian,90
and two Polish91
cases have
been decided on the merits. It is somewhat paradoxical that the ECtHR only started
to deal with lustration almost two decades after the change of regimes in Central
and Eastern Europe took place.
Cases from the Baltic States
As said before, the first lustration case came from Lithuania.92
Mr. Sidabras and
Mr. Džiautas both worked for the Lithuanian branch of the KGB during the Communist
regime. After Lithuania declared its independence in 1990, Mr. Sidabras
worked as a tax inspector and Mr. Džiautas as a prosecutor. In January 1999, the
Lithuanian KGB Act came into force. As a result of this Act, both applicants were
dismissed from their posts and banned from applying for public-sector and various
private-sector posts from 1999 until 2009. In short, the ECtHR held that the
ban on the applicants’ engaging in professional activities in various private-sector
spheres such as banks, communication companies, jobs requiring the carrying of
a weapon or practising as a lawyer until 2009 had affected their private life as
protected by Article 8 ECHR.
However, the ECtHR did not did not find a violation of the applicants’ right to
private life taken alone. Instead, it found a violation of Article 8 ECHR, taken in
conjunction with Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination). It did so in particular
on three grounds:93
(1) the applicants’ employment prospects were restricted not
only in the public sector, but also in various spheres of the private sector;94
(2) the
wording of ‘protected positions’ was vague;95
and (3) the adoption of the
Lithuanian KGB Act was belated.96
As to the third ground, the ECtHR observed
that ‘the KGB Act came into force ... almost a decade after Lithuania had declared
its independence ... [as a result of] which the restrictions on the applicants’ profes-
88 ECtHR 7 April 2005, Cases Nos. 70665/01 and 74345/01, Rainys and Gasparavičius v. Lithuania.
89 ECtHR 14 Feb. 2006, Case No. 57986/00, Turek v. Slovakia.
90 ECtHR 16 March 2006, Case No. 58278/00, Ždanoka v. Latvia [GC].
91 ECtHR 24 April 2007, Case No. 38184/03, Matyjek v. Poland; and ECtHR 17 July 2007, Case
No. 68761/01, Bobek v. Poland.
92 ECtHR, Sidabras and Džiautas v. Lithuania, Cases Nos. 55480/00 and 59330/00, ECHR 2004-
VIII.
93 This paper to a large extent leaves aside ECtHR’s highly questionable Art. 14 analysis. The
ECtHR somehow forgot the ‘similar situation’ stage in the Art. 14 test. See partly dissenting opinions
of Judge Loucaides.
94 The ECtHR reiterated that ‘the requirement of an employee’s loyalty to the State was an
inherent condition of employment with State authorities ... [but] there is not inevitably such a requirement
for employment with private companies’ (§ 57).
95 Sidabras and Džiautas, § 59.
96 Ibid., § 60.
474 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
sional activities were imposed on them thirteen years [Sidabras] and nine years
respectively [Džiautas] after their departure from the KGB.’97
It is not entirely
clear whether it was only the cumulative effect of these three deficiencies that
affected the outcome of this case, or whether one or two deficiencies might have
sufficed.
In the second Lithuanian case, Rainys and Gasparavičius v. Lithuania,98
the ECtHR
relied heavily on its reasoning in Sidabras and Džiautas99
and again stressed ‘the
very belated nature of the [KGB] Act.’100
However, it also distinguished Rainys
and Gasparavičius from Sidabras and Džiautas on the ground that the applicants, Rainys
and Gasparavičius, were actually dismissed from existing employment in the private
sector,101
whereas applicants in Sidabras and Džiautas were dismissed from public
service and thus subjected only to the ‘hypothetical inability to apply for various
private-sector jobs until 2009.’102
In other words, the ECtHR found the applicants’
complaints in Rainys and Gasparavičius even more substantiated and implicitly
considered dismissal from certain private-sector jobs as a harsher encroachment
upon the right to private life than the mere prevention from access to employment
in that sector. The ECtHR thus again found violation of Article 14 taken in conjunction
with Article 8.
The third case, a Grand Chamber judgment in Ždanoka v. Latvia103
was not an
Article 8 case. It involved the right to free elections (Article 3 of Protocol No. 1).
The facts might be briefly summarised as follows. Pursuant to Latvia’s Parliamentary
Elections Act,104
Mrs. Ždanoka was excluded from standing as a candidate
for the 1998 parliamentary elections due to her activities in the Communist Party
of Latvia (CPL) in 1991 after an unsuccessful coup d’état orchestrated by the
CPL.105
As to the merits, the ECtHR provided a thorough analysis of the right to
free elections and historical and political circumstances of Latvia’s restoration of
independence, and finally concluded that Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 was not
violated.106
The ECtHR generally reaffirmed the legitimacy of the concept of a
97 Id.
98 ECtHR, Rainys and Gasparavičius v. Lithuania, Cases Nos. 70665/01 and 74345/01, 7 April
2005.
99 Ibid., § 34-35.
100 Ibid., § 36.
101 Mr. Rainys was employed as a lawyer in a private telecommunications company and Mr.
Gasparavičius was a practising barrister.
102 Rainys and Gasparavičius, § 34.
103 ECtHR 16 March 2006, Case No. 58278/00, Ždanoka v. Latvia [GC].
104 Latvia, Parliamentary Elections Act [Saeimas v¹l¹šanu likums] of 25 May 1995, sec. 5(6).
105 For a complicated factual background of this case which cannot be addressed here, see §§ 12-
51 of the judgment.
106 I will leave aside the issue that the ECtHR’s ruling in Ždanoka seems to be inconsistent with
its previous case-law since intrusion on to democratic elections is from a democratic point of view
far more serious than dismissing a tax inspector or a corporate lawyer. The alternative view (but not
475Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
‘democracy capable of defending itself’,107
but articulated one important principle
that is relevant for the Czech Lustration Acts:
[T]he Latvian Parliament must keep the statutory restriction under constant review,
with a view to bringing it to an early end. Such a conclusion seems all the more justified
in view of the greater stability which Latvia now enjoys, inter alia, by reason
of its full European integration.... Hence, the failure by the Latvian legislature to
take active steps in this connection may result in a different finding by the
Court.108
As to the ‘belated timing’ element, the ECtHR distinguished Ždanoka from the
Lithuanian lustration cases mentioned above on the ground that the Lithuanian
KGB Act imposed ‘much more far-reaching restriction of personal rights barring
… access to various spheres of employment in the private sector’109
and that the
Lithuanian lustrations ‘were introduced almost a decade after the re-establishment
of Lithuanian independence.’110
The four-year delay in adopting the Latvian Parliamentary
Elections Act was found acceptable as ‘a newly-established democratic
legislature should need time for reflection in a period of political turmoil to enable
it to consider what measures were required to sustain its achievements’111
which was in this case buttressed by the presence of the Russian troops in Latvia
until 1994.
Finally, the ECtHR in Ždanoka elucidated ‘the-need-for-individualisation’ requirement.
While it observed that this requirement ‘is not a pre-condition of the
measure’s compatibility with the Convention’,112
it stressed that ‘[t]he need for
individualisation of a legislative measure alleged by an individual to be in breach
of the Convention, and the degree of that individualisation where it is required by
the Convention, depend on the circumstances of each particular case, namely the
elucidated by the ECtHR) is that it is the very significance of the position which justifies applying
lustration to Mrs. Ždanoka. It thus seems that it was special historico-political circumstances (see §§
115(c) and 121) of the restoration of Latvia’s independence which was decisive for the outcome of
the case.
107 See Ždanoka [GC], § 100.
108 Ibid., § 135 [emphasis added, citation omitted]. Note that the ECtHR in Ždanoka seems to
have adopted a well-known strategy of many constitutional courts in Europe, i.e., to hold in favour
of the Government but to warn it that it will decide the other way unless the Government acts to
amend or repeal the law (for similar German practice cf. D. Kommers, supra n. 53, at p. 53).
109 Ibid., § 131. However, this should operate rather against Latvia’s Parliamentary Elections
Act (see supra n. 106).
110 Id.
111 Id. The ECtHR cited the Rekvényi case (ECtHR 20 May 1999, Case No. 25390/94, Rekvényi
v. Hungary [GC]) in support of its conclusion.
112 Ibid., § 114.
476 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
nature, type, duration and consequences of the impugned statutory restriction.’113
Most importantly, it distinguished the right to private life from (the ‘passive’ aspect
of) the right to free elections since ‘[f]or a restrictive measure to comply with
Article 3 of Protocol No. 1, a lesser degree of individualisation may be sufficient,
in contrast to situations concerning an alleged breach of Articles 8-11 of the Con-
vention’.114
Thus, Article 8 not only requires more intensive review of its alleged
infringement115
but also a higher degree of individualisation than Article 3 of
Protocol No. 1.
Slovak and Polish cases
The fourth case, Turek v. Slovakia,116
did not directly tackle the issue of conformity
of the Lustration Act with the ECHR, but dealt primarily with the length of
proceedings and equality of arms.117
More specifically, the applicant challenged
solely the inclusion of his name on the list of State Security Police collaborators
and argued that he was denied access to his file since it was categorised as a national
secret. The ECtHR again confirmed that a positive lustration certificate
may affect the private life of the person concerned, but in this case ‘only’ found a
violation of Article 8 concerning the lack of a procedure by which the applicant
could seek protection for his right to respect for his private life.
Half a year later, in the Matyjek case,118
the first judgment in a case concerning
the 1997 Polish Lustration Act, the ECtHR upheld its admissibility decision119
and acknowledged that lustration triggers the criminal law head of Article 6. Mr.
Matyjek, who had been a member of the Polish Parliament (Sejm), had declared
that he had not collaborated with the communist-era secret services,120
but the
Polish courts found him a deliberate and secret collaborator with the secret services
and that he had therefore lied in his lustration declaration. As a result, Mr.
Matyjek was deprived of his mandate as a member of parliament and was banned
from being a candidate in elections or from holding any other public office for the
next 10 years.121
The ECtHR held that the lustration proceedings against the ap-
113 Ibid., § 115(d).
114 Id. [emphasis added].
115 A contrario ibid., § 115(c).
116 ECtHR 14 Feb. 2006, Case No. 57986/00, Turek v. Slovakia.
117 One could even ask if this should really qualify as a lustration case, seeing Slovakia does not
actually apply their own lustration law, thus nobody there is excluded from office.
118 ECtHR 24 April 2007, Case No. 38184/03, Matyjek v. Poland.
119 ECtHR 30 May 2006, Case No. 38184/03, Matyjek v. Poland (dec.), §§ 48-59.
120 For consequences of such a declaration, see supra n. 74.
121 Having been found to be a ‘lustration liar’ entails dismissal from public function exercised by
the person concerned and prevents her from applying for the protected provisions for a period of
477Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
plicant, taken as a whole, violated Article 6(1) taken together with Article 6(3)
ECHR.122
The Matyjek case to a large extent resembles the Turek case, since it also focuses
on the access to the classified materials and equality of arms123
and because the
ECtHR again avoided taking a clear stance on the Lustration Acts as such. Nevertheless,
there are two dicta which are worthy of mention. On the one hand, the
ECtHR recognised that ‘at the end of the 1990s the State had an interest in carrying
out lustration in respect of persons holding the most important public functions’,124
but at the same time it stressed that ‘if a State is to adopt lustration measures, it
must ensure that the persons affected thereby enjoy all procedural guarantees under
the Convention in respect of any proceedings relating to the application of such
measures.’125
The most recent case, Bobek v. Poland,126
is to a large extent a follow-up to
Matyjek. Ms. Bobek was an advocate, who made a declaration under the provisions
of the 1997 Polish Lustration Act that she had never secretly collaborated with
the communist secret service, and subsequently was found to be a ‘lustration liar’.
She alleged a violation of her right to fair trial since she had not had access to the
file to an extent sufficient to ensure the fairness of the proceedings and since the
motivation of the judgments had never been served on her or made accessible to
the public.
The ECtHR relied heavily on the judgments in Matyjek, Turek, Sidabras and
RainysandGasparavičius.Itreiteratedthat‘theState-imposedrestrictionsonaperson’s
opportunity to exercise employment in a private sector for reasons of a lack of loyalty
to the State in the past could not be justified from the Convention perspective ...
in particular in the light of the long period which had elapsed since the fall of the
communist regime’127
and that ‘if a State is to adopt lustration measures, it must
ensure that the persons affected thereby enjoy all the procedural guarantees of the
Convention’.128
It added that some state documents might be kept confidential,
but given the considerable time which has elapsed since the documents were created,
this must be only exceptional.129
As a result, the ECtHR had no reason to depart
10 years. For further details, see supra nn. 74 and 77, and A. Czarnota, ‘The Politics of the Lustration
Law in Poland: 1989-2006’, in A. Mayer-Rieckh and P. de Greiff (eds.), supra n. 71, p. 222.
122 Interestingly, Mr. Matyjek did not invoke the right to free elections before the ECtHR.
123 Albeit in contrast to Turek, the ECtHR did so on the Art. 6, and not on the Art. 8, ground.
124 Matyjek, § 62 [emphasis added]. Interestingly, the ECtHR did not address the ‘belated timing’
argument, although the 1997 Polish Lustration Act was adopted only two years prior to the Lithuanian
KGB Act.
125 Id. (quoting Turek , § 115) [emphasis added].
126 ECtHR 17 July 2007, Case No. 68761/01, Bobek v. Poland.
127 Bobek, § 63 (quoting Rainys and Gasparavičius, § 36) [emphasis added].
128 Ibid., § 69 (quoting Turek, § 115; and Matyjek, § 62).
129 Id.
478 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
from Matyjek and again found a violation of Article 6(1) taken in conjunction with
Article 6(3) ECHR.
Summary of ECtHR’s principles applicable to lustration cases
In sum, the ECtHR jurisprudence stipulates seven principles that are applicable
for any lustration act. First, a positive lustration certificate may amount to a violation
of one’s private life, especially when a person does not have access to classified
materials relevant to his lustration file. Second, a lustration act must distinguish
between the public and private sectors. It is not entirely clear whether exclusion
from positions in the private sector is prohibited at all,130
but applicability of the
lustration act to private jobs is surely an aggravating factor.131
Third, the ‘belated
timing’ is relevant to the overall assessment of the proportionality of the lustration
acts132
even though this element does not seem to be in itself conclusive.133
Fourth,
there is a distinction between access to the ‘protected positions’ and dismissal
from ‘protected positions’. Pursuant to consistent case-law of the ECtHR, the
states must provide weightier reasons in case of dismissal. However, the ECtHR
has not explicitly broadened this principle (at least not in the lustration context) to
any of the posts within the public service and thus it is not clear whether it applies
equally to the positions in the public and the private sector.134
Fifth, since the
Matyjek case, the ECtHR made clear that lustration acts may trigger the criminal
part of Article 6 (right to fair trial). Sixth, a person affected by lustration must
enjoy all procedural guarantees in the subsequent proceedings, including a sufficient
degree of individualisation. Finally, although the transition-to-democracy
rationale of the acts under challenge generally allows for a wider margin of appreciation,
lustration acts are inherently temporary measures and must be under constant
review. This principle creates a significant problem for lustration acts that
have been adopted for an indefinite period of time or the time limits of which
were repealed.
130 This is a position of the Polish Constitutional Court. See Judgment of the Polish Constitutional
Court of 11 May 2007, No. K 2/07; and also M. Safjan, ‘Transitional Justice: The Polish
Example, the Case of Lustration’, 1 European Journal of Legal Studies (2007), No. 2, p. 18.
131 In fact, the factor that lustration laws apply to important public functions is what justifies the
intrusion represented by lustration.
132 Slovak politicians do not seem to be aware of this factor when proposing the reintroduction
of lustration in Slovakia; see I. Petranský (Interview), ‘Proti zavedení lustrací bych nebyl’ [I wouldn’t
say no to the introduction of lustration], Hospodářské noviny, 7 Feb. 2007, p. 9.
133 This principle might be stricter as more time lapses from the moment of transition to de-
mocracy.
134 This paper does not suggest that the Convention contains the right of access to the civil
service (see infra).
479Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
135 And definitely unlike the 2006 Polish Lustration Act [Ustawa z 18 X 2006 o ujawnieniu
informacji o dokumentach organów bezpieczeństwa państwa z lat 1944-1990 oraz treści tych
dokumentów, Dz.U.No 218, poz.1592] of 18 Oct. 2006. However, the main part of the 2006 Polish
Lustration Act was repealed by the Judgment of the Polish Constitutional Court of 11 May 2007,
No. K 2/07. See also M. Safjan, supra n. 130.
136 Sidabras and Džiautas, § 60.
137 But see Concurring opinion of Judge Mularoni and strong dissenting opinions of Judge
Loucaides and Judge Thomassen (ibid.).
138 But cf. ECtHR 28 Aug. 1986, Case No. 9228/80, Glasenapp v. Germany (rejection of Mrs.
Glasenapp’s appointment as a secondary school teacher found in conformity with the Convention)
on the one hand; and ECtHR 26 Sept. 1995, Case No. 17851/91, Vogt v. Germany (dismissal of Mrs.
Vogt from her post as secondary school teacher found in violation of the Convention) on the other.
Both cases involve review of conformity of the 1972 Decree on the Employment of Extremists in
the Civil Service (also referred to as the ‘Civil Loyalty Decree’) with the ECHR. For further details,
(How long) can the Czech Lustration Acts survive the scrutiny
of the ECtHR?
Let us now examine the Czech Lustration Acts in light of the seven principles of
the ECtHR jurisprudence. The second and third principles can be easily rebutted.
Unlike in Lithuania, the scope of ‘protected positions’ envisaged by the Czech
Lustration Acts is limited to public service positions and specific arms-related
trade licences. Moreover, they were adopted immediately after the Velvet Revolution
and therefore were not belated, unlike in Lithuania, and arguably also unlike
the 1997 Polish Lustration Act.135
It should be also remembered that the ECtHR
made it clear that ‘belated timing’ does not seem in itself decisive.136
The remaining principles represent a bigger challenge to the Czech Lustration
Acts. But as I will show, it is still possible to distinguish the Lustration Acts from
their foreign counterparts. To this end, I will address these five principles one by
one. As to the first principle, the Czech Lustration Acts allow for full access to
State Security Police files before the court (a contrario Turek). Moreover, in Sidabras
the ECtHR refused to consider whether there had been a violation of Article 8
taken alone137
(i.e., not in conjunction with Article 14). This refusal thus still arguably
leaves the outcome of the challenge on the conformity of the Lithuanian
KGB Act as such open.
As to the fourth principle, the access/dismissal distinction, it can be reasonably
argued that the importance of this distinction as elaborated in Rainys and
Gasparavičius v. Lithuania is limited only to private-sector jobs and not to employment
in public service. Put differently, from the Rainys holding that the dismissal
from private-sector jobs is a harsher encroachment than the mere prevention from
access to employment in that sector, it is not possible to infer per analogiam that the
dismissal from a public-service job is also a harsher measure than the prevention
of access to the public service.138
480 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
cf. D. Kommers, supra n. 53, at p. 229-234; or G. Braunthal, Political Loyalty and Public Service in West
Germany: The 1972 Decree against Radicals and its Consequences (Amherst, University of Massachusetts
Press 1990).
139 ECtHR 28 Aug. 1986, Case No. 9228/80, Glasenapp v. Germany.
140 ECtHR 26 Sept. 1995, Case No. 17851/91, Vogt v. Germany, § 43.
141 Note that the list of ‘suspect positions’ is rather long and includes also posts in the universities
and state media which involve neither security risks nor the exercise of the sovereign state
authority. The ECtHR thus might decline to consider these posts as public offices in the strict sense
which call for more deferential review (cf. ECtHR 19 April 2007, Case No. 63235/00, Vilho Eskelinen
and others v. Finland, §§ 57 and 62). Such a judgment would be capable of eroding the Czech Lustration
Acts as such.
142 A contrario Matyjek (dec.), §§ 48-51.
143 Ibid., §§ 52-53 and 56.
To be clear, this paper does not put forth the argument that the Convention
contains the right of access to the public service. On the contrary, the ECtHR has
since Glasenapp139
consistently held that there is no such right enshrined in the
Convention and it is highly unlikely that it will change its mind. But the ECtHR
also added that ‘this does not mean … that a person who has been appointed a
civil servant cannot complain on being dismissed if that dismissal violates one of
his or her rights under the Convention’140
and thus the application of Article 8 of
the Convention to the lustration cases remains open. Furthermore, the ECtHR
might also choose to adopt an autonomous meaning of the notion of ‘public
service’ and interpret this notion narrowly.141
Nevertheless, as long as the ECtHR
does not take a clear stance in the lustration cases on the access/dismissal dichotomy,
at least as to some of the public-sector posts within the ‘protected positions’,
one may argue that this dichotomy is not applicable to the Czech Lustration
Acts, since they do not include private-sector jobs. Hence the Czech Lustration
Acts survive the fourth principle.
The fifth principle may arguably be set aside on the ground that the holding of
the ECtHR that the lustration acts trigger the criminal law part of Article 6 is
limited to the 1997 Polish Lustration Act and that the Czech Lustration Acts can
still be distinguished from it. First, the Czech Lustration Acts lack strong criminal
connotations since they do not use the Code of Criminal Procedure subsidiarily
and the course of the Czech lustration proceedings is not based on the model of
the Czech criminal trial.142
Secondly, while the Czech lustration is also directed to
a broad group of individuals, the nature of the ‘offence’ is different from typical
criminal offences and, most importantly, the purpose of the Czech lustration is
not to punish but to prevent former employees of the communist-era secret services
from taking up employment in public institutions and other spheres of activity
vital to the national security of the State.143
Finally, the severity of the
employment restrictions applied to those who held one of the ‘suspect positions’
481Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
144 Ibid., §§ 54-55; see also Ždanoka [GC], § 122 and ECtHR 1 July 2003, Cases Nos. 55480/00
and 59330/00, Sidabras and Džiautas v. Lithuania (dec.).
145 See also European Commission of Human Rights, 28 June 1995, Case No. 24157/94, Matejka
v. Slovakia (dec.), where the Commission held that the issue of the positive lustration certificate
under the ‘Large Lustration Act’ cannot be regarded as a criminal charge within the meaning of Art.
6 of the Convention.
146 These three criteria are the legal classification of the offence in question in national law, the
very nature of the offence and the nature and degree of severity of the penalty (ECtHR 8 June
1976, Cases Nos. 5100/71 and others, Engel and Others v. the Netherlands, § 82); see also Matyjek (dec.),
§§ 43-47.
147 Note that a recent shift in the case-law of the ECtHR on the applicability of Art. 6 on the
civil servants (cf. ECtHR 19 April 2007, Case No. 63235/00, Vilho Eskelinen and others v. Finland, §
62), opens the route for challenging the lustration laws also on the ‘civil law’ limb of Art. 6.
148 Turek, §§ 111-112.
149 Kühn, supra n. 47, at p. 377.
150 Ždanoka [GC], § 115(c) and (d).
under the Czech Lustration Acts is not such as to bring the issue into the ‘criminal’
sphere.144
Moreover, the Turek judgment did not find the criminal limb applicable
to the (Czechoslovak) Large Lustration Act and the a contrario argument may be
inferred.145
Hence, the Engel criteria146
for the criminal law part of Article 6 are
presumably not met.147
However, the availability of procedural guarantees is not limited to Article 6
and thus even if the criminal law part of Article 6 is inapplicable, the sixth principle
(‘a person affected by lustration must enjoy all procedural guarantees in the
subsequent proceedings’) still applies on account of the procedural aspect of Ar-
ticle8.148
In fact, as I mentioned earlier, it has been argued that the Czech Lustration
Acts lack effective remedies and instead of considering the individual circumstances
of a particular case, rely merely on the formalistic criteria – inclusion or
non-inclusion of the name in the State Security Police files.149
Therefore, the sixth
principle poses a significant threat to the Czech Lustration Acts.
But it is the seventh principle of ‘constant review of lustration acts’ that is
most difficult to tackle, since the 2000 Amendment to both Lustration Acts repealed
the time limit altogether. The only way to contest the applicability of this
principle is to argue that it was the right to stand for election to the national parliament
which was at stake in Ždanoka, and that the scrutiny of an alleged violation
of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 is more searching than in Article 8 cases, which the
ECtHR rejected and held to the contrary.150
However, the ECtHR in the end did
not find a violation of the right to stand for election in Ždanoka and one may only
guess whether the Czech Lustration Acts would meet a heightened Article 8 scrutiny.
Notwithstanding this ambiguity, the effort to dismiss the applicability of the
seventh principle is quite a stretch, in particular when we take into account the
fact that the transition to democracy in the Czech Republic was very different
482 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
151
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 US 306 (2003).
152
Ibid., 337 (2003). But note that it is disputable whether this statement is a ratio decidendi or
merely an obiter dictum of O’Connor’s opinion.
153
See supra n. 54.
from Latvia’s ‘close-to-civil-law scenario’ in 1991 and the special circumstances
resulting therefrom in the mid-1990’s.
However, one should not conclude too hastily that the Czech Lustration Law
does not survive the scrutiny of the ECtHR. On the contrary, one must admit
that the absence of clear deficiencies in the Czech Lustration Acts makes it possible
to reconcile them with the standards of the ECtHR as they now stand. In the
terminology of the ECtHR, the Czech Lustration Acts might still be within the
‘margin of appreciation’. But as Bob Dylan sings, ‘the times they are a-changing’
and, in the case of lustration, they are indeed changing very rapidly. Put differently,
the circle is closing and distinguishing the Czech Lustration Acts from their
counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe and the ECtHR’s jurisprudence becomes
more and more difficult. This conclusion is all the more the case if we
consider the cumulative effect of all seven principles stemming from the ECtHR’s
jurisprudence (especially the requirement of ‘constant review’ in conjunction with
‘lack of individualisation’ argument) and not one by one.
Should the Czech Lustration law be annulled by the Czech
Constitutional Court?
The previous section concluded that the Czech Lustration Acts would probably
still pass the scrutiny of the ECtHR. At the same time, the ECtHR requires that
the lustration laws are under ‘constant review’ on the national level. Therefore, the
question is how long the Czech Lustration Acts can survive this scrutiny. The exact
number of years in cases like these is difficult to determine. For instance, in a
different context (now former) Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in Grutter151
held
that ‘we expect that 25 years from now [i.e. from 2003], the use of racial preferences
will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today [in obtaining
the educational benefits that flow from the diverse student body].’152
In contrast, the Czech Constitutional Court did not spell out the exact number
of years in the Lustration II case.153
But I would argue that there are strong indicators
that 17 years after the adoption of the Czech Lustration Acts (and almost two
decades after the Velvet Revolution), the political situation has changed to such an
extent that these Acts should be annulled. State institutions have been purified to
a large extent and the risk of subversion or a possible return of totalitarianism is
no longer realistic, in particular after joining NATO in 1999 and the European
483Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
154
Cf. Ždanoka [GC], § 135.
155
A top manager in the Czech Television mentioned in the introduction first moved from the
position of programme director of the Czech TV to the position of financial director in Feb. 2007
and only eventually in Nov. 2007 he handed in his notice and thus left the Czech TV entirely (see
Lambert jde z televize [Lambert Leaves TV], Respekt, No. 47/2007, p. 6).
156
Since by the very nature of their positions they did not have to sign the declaration of cooperation
with the State Security Police.
Union in 2004.154
Under these circumstances the deficiencies of the Acts, that
have not been addressed by the ECtHR due to jurisdictional bars, outweigh the
benefits.
These deficiencies can be easily explained by the examples mentioned in the
introduction to this paper. First, high-ranking managers in the state-owned companies
or in the public media can easily evade lustration (and subsequent revelation)
by moving to positions that are not enumerated in the ‘protected positions’
of the Large Lustration Act (provided that they enjoy political backing).155
Secondly,
many files of the State Security Police (including the file of the current
President Václav Klaus) have been shredded and the information contained therein
either is found by accident and often incomplete in a different file (as in the case
of a famous singer mentioned in the introduction) or disappeared forever (as in
case of one of the files of Václav Klaus). And finally, in view of the nature of the
high-ranking positions held during the Communist era, many important figures
most likely collaborated with the State Security Police without being mentioned in
the State Security Police files.156
The former Prime Minister who served during
communism as the adviser to the president of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia
is a prime example.
More in general, whole groups fall outside the scope of the Czech Lustration
Acts. It is a well-known fact that the ordinary members of the Communist Party,
holders of other important positions not enumerated among the ‘suspect positions’
in the Large Lustration Act, or simply family members shielded by the people
belonging to the previous two groups, did not have to sign the declaration of cooperation
with the State Security Police and still enjoyed privileged status in the
communist regime. We may collectively refer to these groups as the ‘lucky guys’.
In complete contrast to these privileged groups stand those ‘unlucky’ individuals
who were subjected to extortion and/or forced to collaborate. As I have argued
earlier, due to the formalistic criteria of the Czech Lustration Acts (the sole
decisive criterion for the biggest category of ‘suspect positions’ is whether a particular
name appears in the State Security Police files) these people are positively
lustrated, even though they did not provide the State Security Police with any
valuable information and irrespective of their motivation or subsequent
484 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
157 This is not intended to trivialise or justify the weakness and wrongdoings of those who
‘merely’ signed (or were forced to sign) the co-operation agreement with the State Security Police,
but did not subsequently provide the State Security Police with any information (or provided information
of no value). This paper just puts forth the argument that these people often caused lesser
harm to their fellow citizens during the communist regime than certain groups of individuals mentioned
above who are not included within the ‘suspect positions.’ Hence, it is on this ground that
their treatment is blatantly unjust.
158 See also Přibáň 2007, supra n. 71, at p. 333 (‘The[se persons] were sacrificed so that the vast
majority of society loyal to the previous regime for decades could feel morally purified and label all
those responsible for their own “suffering”.’).
159 I draw the following meanings of substantive justice freely from J. Meierhenrich, supra n. 36,
at p. 102-103.
behaviour.157
With a touch of cynicism, one may refer to them as the ‘collateral
damage’ of the Czech Lustration Acts.158
The Czech Lustration Acts thus are both overinclusive and underinclusive.
Underinclusive since they do not cover many important positions in the communist
regime and individuals whose State Security Police files were shredded (or
they managed to have them shredded). Overinclusive since they cover persons
who co-operated with the State Security Police under duress while there are no
grounds for exoneration or time limits. These two major deficiencies are exacerbated
by the fact that the State Security Police files are incomplete and unreliable.
As a result, the substantive justice provided by the Czech Lustration Acts is
highly selective. This conclusion stands irrespective of what we understand under
‘substantive justice’ of lustration.159
The Czech Lustration Acts certainly provided
no justice to victims of Communism (meaning 1), which is clear from the critical
reactions of many dissidents. If we look at the experiences of the former Prime
Minister and a top manager of the Czech Television (that are only a tip of the
iceberg), justice as retribution or punishment for wrongdoing (meaning 2) failed
as well, notwithstanding the fact that supporters of lustration would vigorously
deny this rationale for the Czech Lustration Acts. Finally, if we understand justice
of lustration as a necessary forward-looking prophylactic measure (meaning 3),
this argument lacks empirical basis (in fact, it is debunked by the latest presidential
elections in the Czech Republic) and its strength diminishes with time.
It may be also plausibly argued that repeal of the Czech Lustration Acts will
have more prophylactic effect than its preservation. In fact, the Lustration Acts
put the issue of ‘dealing with the past’ under the carpet since those with a negative
lustration certificate are considered ‘crystal clear’ and those with a positive lustration
certificate become so stigmatised that they refrain from speaking out. The repeal
of the Lustration Acts would thus trigger the open debate on the ‘dealing with the
past’ and challenge the black-and-white picture of the life under Communism in
the former Czechoslovakia.
485Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
160 It is a recurring theme for the Czech press to speculate who is in possession of the ‘lost’
State Security Police files and what influence these individuals can exercise on the key decisionmaking
of the Czech State.
161 Judgment of the Polish Constitutional Court of 10 Nov. 1998, No. K 39/97.
162 Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 US 579, 635-638 (1952) (Jackson concurring).
163 Art. 3(1) of the Charter which reads as follows: ‘Everyone is guaranteed the enjoyment of
her fundamental rights and basic freedoms without regard to gender, race, colour of skin, language,
faith and religion, political or other conviction, national or social origin, membership in a national or
ethnic minority, property, birth, or other status’ [author’s translation]. See also a general principle of
equality stipulated in Art. 1 of the Charter, supra n. 39.
164 Art. 21(4) of the Charter which reads as follows: ‘Citizens shall have access, on an equal
basis, to any elective and other public office’ [author’s translation].
165 See, e.g., Decision of the Czech Constitutional Court No. II. 53/06 of 12 Sept. 2006. Furthermore,
the Czech Constitutional Court interpreted the right of access to the public service on an
equal basis broadly so as to encompass also the dismissal from public office (id.).
166 The 2000 Amendment to the Czech Constitution abolished a specific group of international
human rights treaties that were accorded constitutional status. However, the Czech Constitutional
Furthermore, the Czech Lustration Acts feed behind-the-curtain coercion of
key public servants since it allows those who are in possession of the appropriate
State Security Police files to use a person’s political past for the purpose of blackmail.
This is not paranoia but a serious issue that has not been fully addressed in
the Czech Republic.160
In fact, according to the Polish Constitutional Court, the
main aim of the 1997 Polish Lustration Act was to make this coercion impos-
sible.161
It is thus high time to bring down the curtain and disentangle these bonds.
Coming back to the impact of ‘lapse of time’, borrowing the language of Justice
Jackson from his concurrence in Youngstown,162
we may conclude that any
transitional-justice argument is most compelling immediately after the democratic
revolution. Its strength diminishes as time lapses and once the state reaches a
considerable degree of stability (evidenced, among others, by integration in the
supranational entities such as NATO and/or the EU) it is at its lowest. The Czech
Republic has clearly reached the third stage.
What does that mean for the Czech Lustration Acts? Before we can answer
this question, we must point out the differences between the Czech Charter of
Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms and the Convention. First, in contrast to
the accessory character of the prohibition of discrimination guaranteed by Article
14 ECHR, the Charter contains a self-standing right not to be discriminated
against.163
Secondly, while the Convention does not include the right of access to
the public service, the Charter does164
and the Czech Constitutional Court found
it justiciable.165
As a result, many jurisdictional bars that in the previous chapter
saved the Czech Lustration Acts from being a violation of the ECHR are not
applicable to the challenge under the Charter. However, the principles distilled
from the ECtHR’s jurisprudence do apply since pursuant to the consistent caselaw
of the Czech Constitutional Court the Convention has constitutional status.166
486 David Kosař EuConst 4 (2008)
Court opined that it is not possible to lower the existing procedural standard of the protection of
human rights and thus retained the constitutional status of, among others, the ECHR; see, among
others, Decision of the Czech Constitutional Court No. Pl. 36/01 of 25 June 2002, available in
English at <http://angl.concourt.cz/angl_verze/cases.php>, visited 17 Aug. 2008.
167 This was supposed to be the Act on State Service (Act No. 218/2002 Coll., on the service of
state employees in administrative agencies and on the remuneration of these employees and other
employees in administrative agencies of 26 April 2002), which should have replaced the Czech
Lustration Acts. But the Czech legislators missed the opportunity to adapt the Czech Lustration
Acts to the demands of the rule of law and left them untouched.
168 Decision of the Hungarian Constitutional Court of 24 Dec. 1994, No. 60/1994 AB. For
details of these two contrasting positions, see Robertson, supra n. 9.
169 See Robertson, supra n. 9, or E. Barrett, P. Hack and Á. Munkácsi, ‘Lustration as Political
Competition: Vetting in Hungary’, in A. Mayer-Rieckh and P. de Greiff (eds.), supra n. 71, p. 259.
170 It might suggest that even though the Czech Lustration Acts were in certain aspects very
comprehensive, its ‘settings’ were better adjusted to the needs of Czech society than were the comparable
Acts in other central and eastern European countries to their societies.
This is a deadly mix for the Czech Lustration Acts. Given the considerable
lapse of time and the joining of supranational organisations such as NATO and
the EU, the transitional-justice argument leaves the contaminated past far behind.
Thus, the restraint exercised by the Czech Constitutional Court in 2001 is no longer
justifiable. As said, the Czech Lustration Acts are both overinclusive and underinclusive
and they do not allow for any individualization of a particular case. Moreover,
the Czech legislature failed to keep these Acts under ‘constant review’. Against
the backdrop of ECtHR case-law, the argumentation put forward by petitioners
in the Lustration II case would be sufficient in 2008. This does not mean that the
Czech Republic cannot protect itself against people who might wish to subvert it
by require loyalty to the democratic principles from applicants for public service.
It must do so on the basis of a statute which is fully compatible with the rule of
law.167
Conclusion
The Czechoslovak Parliament enjoyed legitimacy to adopt and prolong the
Lustration Acts. The courts correctly upheld them in 1992 (Lustration I) and 2001
(Lustration II). They were more deferential to the legislature than for instance the
Hungarian Constitutional Court,168
which gave priority to legal certainty and privacy
concerns.169
The Czech solution might be criticised but it has also had irrefutable
positive effects. Most importantly, it preserved the ‘substantive justice’ so
needed after the Velvet Revolution and, in contrast to Poland or Hungary, it forestalled
all attempts to broaden the scope of the Czech Lustration Acts.170
On the other hand, the Czech approach is demanding and requires what the
ECtHR refers to as ‘constant review’. This paper argues that the departure from
487Lustration and Lapse of Time: ‘Dealing with the Past’ in the Czech Republic
171 This paper focuses predominantly on the judicial review of lustration laws, but there is still an
option (and from the democratic point of view an even more desirable one) that the Czech Lustration
Law will be reviewed and repealed by Parliament. However, this scenario is highly unlikely since no
democratic political party wants to be labelled as ‘pro-communist’. Any attempt to repeal the Czech
Lustration Law is also blocked by the immediate media outcry that reflects the symbolic value of
lustration for a significant (or just loud?) part of Czech society.
the standard rule-of-law principles is no longer justified since the unique circumstances
of the transition to democracy in the Czech Republic that existed in 1991
and the following years have disappeared. Although the Acts probably still pass
the ECtHR’s scrutiny, they now violate the Charter and should therefore be an-
nulled.171
What is more, the repeal of the Czech Lustration Acts would contribute
to the maturation of democracy in the Czech Republic.