Czech law hits communist secret police aides, but not all

ACzechoslovakian university functionary missed his book of job endure month under a law banning former communist secret police collaborators from all public administration jobs with the exception of government ministers.Charles University's Faculty of Law sacked vice-dean Michal Tomasek in January under the so-called lustration law from 1991, criticised for obsolescence and double standards.But billionaire Prime Minister Andrej Babis and Culture Minister Oto Klempir, both in office since last December, keep working despite being registered as collaborators in the 1980s."There is discrepancy in the law it does not concern government members, but it does concern others," Josef Mlejnek, a political analyst at Charles University, told AFP."It's not really convincing to insist that someone can't be for his despicable past but can be a minister because the past is no problem here," said lawyer Jan Kysela.The law was passed in 1991 to ban former secret police employees and collaborators from becoming top military officers, university officials, judges and government ministers.It was adopted two years after former Czechoslovakia had shed the totalitarian communist rule of four decades, and two years before it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.Mlejnek said it had a practical goal: "It was necessary to remove people linked to the previous regime from the administration to... Prevent them from taking high posts and joining networks harming the new democratic system".Dozens of thousands of secret police collaborators were unveiled after the 1989 Velvet Revolution.Candidates for public administration jobs have since had to submit a so-called lustration certificate issued by the interior ministry.But the law was diluted in 2014 when an amendment rid government ministers of the duty, the year Babis became finance minister.- 'Bures' -An StB file from 1982 bears the Slovak-born Babis's signature under the alias "Bures", a fairly common surname.Insisting he never signed up, Babis the Czech finance minister in 2014-2017 and premier in 2017-2021 sued the Slovak institute overseeing his StB file, but courts rejected all lawsuits.In 2024, Slovakia's interior ministry decided that Babis "was unlawfully registered as an StB agent", officially purging him of the allegations.But critics complained this was Babis's deal with Slovakia's pro-Russian Prime Minister Robert Fico, his close ally.Unlike Babis, Klempir a former singer has admitted to collaborating with the StB in the 1980s, saying in a recent podcast that he had signed up after the StB "scared me to death"."I have apologised to all. I have forgiven my tormentors and then I tried to forgive myself," he recently told public Czech TV which broadcast an interview with a man whom Klempir had reported to the StB over marijuana possession in the 1980s.The sacked law professor Tomasek, accused of reporting on Czechoslovak dissidents in France in the 1980s according to Czech media, declined to comment on the case for AFP.He only said that both he and his family "feel exhausted by the current media campaign".- 'Largely gone' -Libor Svoboda, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, called the law a "hodgepodge" in its current shape but admitted it had fulfilled its task in the past."The number of people affected by the law keeps falling as those who were at an active age in the 1980s are largely gone now," Svoboda told AFP.The constitutional court said back in 2001 that "as time passes, the relative importance of standpoints and positions of people in a totalitarian state certainly has not vanished, but it has definitely decreased".Kysela told AFP the lustration law had a greater moral than legal value at present."It's not entirely appropriate to think that someone who worked for the previous regime 40 years ago... Represents a real danger for Czech democracy," he said.frj/cwThis article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.