Free Republic

Like Germany back in 1990s, Poland may soon decide to disclose all communist era secret services documents, should the Constitutional Tribunal rule that the current Polish vetting, or "lustration" law is not in agreement with the Constitution. It's the second day of the political battle over the new Polish vetting, or "lustration" law at the Constitutional Tribunal. The law is being examined at the request of members of the far left post-communist Democratic Left Alliance party, who questioned the constitutionality of the vetting act, which requires public persons to disclose whether they had in the past collaborated with the communist...

Polish journalists: lustration statements not humiliating, but obvious 13.03.2007 In response to some journalists calling for a boycott of the new vetting, or 'lustration' law, which requires journalists to admit in writing whether they have nor not been involved in collaboration with communist era secret services, another group of journalists has spoken in support of the law. Earlier a group of liberal and leftist journalists announced they will not obey the new regulations and refused to come clean about their past. In a special inside instruction, Poland's major liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza informed its journalist on how to evade the...

Polish intelligentsia face post-communist vetting Tue Mar 13, 2007 5:17am ET145 By Chris Johnson WARSAW (Reuters) - Andrzej Krawczyk was arrested on a Warsaw street in 1982 with a backpack containing 1,000 pro-democracy leaflets protesting against martial law and the communist crackdown on the Solidarity trade union. In prison, he was forced to sign a document saying he would collaborate with the secret police, but later retracted it and insists he never helped the Soviet-era authorities in any way. Now, 25 years later, Krawczyk is one of thousands of senior Polish officials preparing to try to clear their name under...

Poland looks back in anger New `lustration' law aims to ferret out the nation's `post-communist monster'; observers say leaders overstate the old regime's influence By Tom Hundley Tribune foreign correspondent Published November 28, 2006 WARSAW -- In 1989, when Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a soft-spoken Catholic intellectual, became Poland's first non-communist prime minister in the postwar era, his first promise was to draw "a thick line" separating Poland from its past. Democratic Poland, he clearly implied, would focus on building its future, not settling scores from the past. Seventeen years later, Poland's current leaders--Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the identical twins who serve,...