Lustration
Encyclopedia
Lustration is the government process regulating the participation of former communists, especially informants of the communist secret police
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....

, in the successor political appointee positions or in civil service
Civil service
The term civil service has two distinct meanings:* A branch of governmental service in which individuals are employed on the basis of professional merit as proven by competitive examinations....

 positions in the period after the fall of the various European Communist states in 1989 – 1991. It also applies more broadly to the process of nations' dealing with past human rights abuses or injustices that have occurred. The term is taken from the Roman lustrum
Lustrum
A lustrum was a term for a five-year period in Ancient Rome.The lustration was originally a sacrifice for expiation and purification offered by one of the censors in the name of the Roman people at the close of the taking of the census...

 purification
Ritual purification
Ritual purification is a feature of many religions. The aim of these rituals is to remove specifically defined uncleanliness prior to a particular type of activity, and especially prior to the worship of a deity...

 ritual
Ritual
A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....

s

Policies and laws

In the period of post-communism
Post-Communism
Post-communism is a name sometimes given to the period of political and economic transformation or "transition" in former Communist states located in parts of Europe and Asia, in which new governments aimed to create free market-oriented capitalist economies with some form of parliamentary...

 after the fall of the various European Communist states in 1989–1991, the term came to refer to governments' policies of "mass disqualification of those associated with the abuses under the prior regime". They excluded participation of former communists, and especially informants of the communist secret police, in successor political positions, or even in civil service positions. This exclusion was part of the wider decommunization
Decommunization
Decommunization is a process of overcoming the legacies of the communist state establishments, culture, and psychology in the post-Communist states. It is similar to denazification after Nazism fell...

 campaigns. In some countries, however, lustration laws did not lead to exclusion and disqualification. Lustration law in Hungary (1994-2003) was based on the exposure of compromised state officials, while lustration law in Poland (1999-2005) was based on confession.

Lustration law "is a special public employment law that regulates the process of examining whether a person holding certain higher public positions worked or collaborated with the repressive apparatus of the communist regime.". The 'special' nature of lustration law refers to its transitional character. The 'public employment' nature of lustration law distinguishes it from other methods of criminal justice, such as criminal trials, amnesties, or qualified amnesties. 'The process of examining' refers to the very process of 'lustration', which means examining or screening against secret police archives.

As of 1996, various lustration laws of varying scope were implemented in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....

, Slovakia
Slovakia
The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...

, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

, Macedonia
Republic of Macedonia
Macedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...

, Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...

, Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

, the Baltic States
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

: (Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...

, and Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

); Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

, and Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

. Regional differences were significant; for example, in the Czech Republic and Germany, lustration was much stronger than in other countries). As of 1996 lustration laws had not been passed in Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

, nor in the former Soviet Central Asian Republics of (Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...

, Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan , officially the Kyrgyz Republic is one of the world's six independent Turkic states . Located in Central Asia, landlocked and mountainous, Kyrgyzstan is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west, Tajikistan to the southwest and China to the east...

, Tajikistan
Tajikistan
Tajikistan , officially the Republic of Tajikistan , is a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia. Afghanistan borders it to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east....

, and Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....

) (Ellis, 1996).

The main goal of lustration is to prevent continuation of abuses that had occurred under a former regime. This purification process is carried on in many ways, such as banning former members of the communist parties, from being involved in public positions.

Benefits

Lustration can serve as a form of instant revenge for those who were abused by a past government. Political figures are often banned immediately from government, and the process therefore serves as a more efficient form of justice than pursuit of such figures through court trials. In addition, court trials (another method used when dealing with transitional justice
Transitional justice
Transitional justice generally refers to a range of approaches that states may use to address past human rights violations and includes both judicial and non-judicial approaches. They include series of actions or policies and their resulting institutions, which may be enacted at a point of...

) can be extremely expensive, lengthy, and may be unsuccessful.

Legitimacy is a key factor in having efficient governance. Lustration laws serve as a new set of rules to be implemented to create a new regime and governmental structures.

Costs

Because the process may take place without adequate documentation or investigation, the innocent can be wrongfully accused and held responsible for crimes they may not have committed. Often records are tampered with, and the wrongfully accused are held accountable. This often occurs for the political gain of a new party.

The excluded people are often the most experienced in doing their jobs. Loss of these experienced workers is problematic.

Lustration in Czech Republic

The Czech transition to democracy was quite different from that of other countries. Unlike many of the neighbouring states, the new Czech government did not adjudicate under court
Court
A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...

 trials, but rather took a non-judicial approach to ensure changes would be made.

The new regime was intended to purify the country of past human rights abusers. All those involved with the Communist Secret Police (StB
STB
STB is an acronym that can mean:* Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus – Bachelor of Sacred Theology* Set-top box – a television device that converts signals to viewable images* Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP -- a law firm...

) were blacklisted from holding public office. This included: Upper reaches of the civil service, the judiciary, procuracy, the security service (BIS), army positions, management of state owned enterprises, the central bank, the railways, high academic positions, the public electronic media.

The lustration laws in the Czech Republic were not meant to serve as a form of justice, but rather to ensure that events such as the Communist coup of February 1948
Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948
The Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 – in Communist historiography known as "Victorious February" – was an event late that February in which the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, with Soviet backing, assumed undisputed control over the government of Czechoslovakia, ushering in over four decades...

 would not happen again.

Lustration in Germany

Vergangenheitsbewältigung
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a composite German word that describes processes of dealing with the past , which is perhaps best rendered in English as "struggle to come to terms with the past"...

, Germany's "struggle to come to terms with the past" after the Nazi era, is a forerunner of the late 20th century issues of nations' coming to terms with Communist rule. In some ways it has resembled the later problem of people's dealing with the legacy of East German communist rule.

See also

  • Proclamation of Timişoara
    Proclamation of Timisoara
    The Proclamation of Timişoara was a thirteen-point written document, drafted on March 11, 1990 by the Timişoara participants in Romania's 1989 Revolution, and partly issued in reaction to the first Mineriad...

  • Truth and reconciliation commission
    Truth and Reconciliation Commission
    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid. Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected...

  • Denazification
    Denazification
    Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of the National Socialist ideology. It was carried out specifically by removing those involved from positions of influence and by disbanding or rendering...


Further reading

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