Lustration for all

The issue of the communist past also provoked fierce debate in Poland. In 2007, the country adopted a law which, according to Radio Free Europe’s report, "goes further than anything similar in the region, requiring hundreds of thousands of citizens in positions of authority, including academics, journalists, teachers, and state company executives, to declare in writing whether they cooperated with the communist secret services - or risk losing their jobs".

The law empowers the Institute of National Remembrance (INR), which has communist security-service files, to identify collaborators. People have to submit their declarations to the institute and false statements could lead to a 10-year professional ban.

Attending the very same round table in Bulgaria in 2008 was NRI’s Krzystof Persak who said that in Poland’s case it was the court that had the final word on who was a communist agent. "It is not exactly the fastest way to do it, but it works," he said. "We have had about 100 people who have been caught lying about their past and about 300 people accused of crimes they have committed under communism, of which about 100 were handed sentences," he told The Sofia Echo at the time, something few former communist countries had achieved.

The law’s major problem, however, is its scope that some consider excessive. Radio Free Europe quoted INR Vice President Maria Dmochowska as saying that the process cold prove lengthy. "Some people in our institute think that if we lustrate everyone we need [to] according to the law, it might last longer than 10 years," she said.

Legal troubles
Romania, the same as Poland, also embarked on a new lustration programme aimed at exposing former Securitate agents. Unlike Poland, however, Romania’s newly expanded lustration law fell victim to a potentially fatal legal trap. Under a a constitutional court ruling in 2008, the National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives (NCSSA) cannot itself declare whether an individual collaborated with the Securitate, but has to file a request with the court, presenting its proof to that end.

The court’s decision was based on technical aspects, saying that by issuing verdicts on whether an individual had been part of the secret police apparatus, the council was acting as a substitute to the judicial system, which contravened the constitution. Bucharest’s first attempt to declassify its communist-era files was in 1999, after two years of bitter wrangling in parliament. The NCSSA was set up as an autonomous body accountable only to parliament but by 2004 it met resistance from both the institutions and the secret services.

In 2004, following the elections, it finally started work, exposing a number of key public figures, including political and religious figures. One of the exposed Securitate agents challenged the ruling, leading to the constitutional court ruling that the NCSSA law was unconstitutional, raising the prospect that all its decisions would be declared void. Hence, all findings made by the NCSSA now have to be confirmed by the court. The most recent example is the NCSSA’s request from August this year before a Bucharest court to officially confirm Romania’s ambassador in Sofia, Anton Pacuretu, as a collaborator of the Securitate.    

In between
Bulgaria’s approach to communist secret agents can be described as "somewhere in between". The law, adopted in 2006, does not provide for lustration of such people but only for revealing their names to the public. The committee set up by law was entrusted with examining a large number of key public positions as well as employees of state-owned public broadcasters, private media and polling agencies, among others.

The committee was given a list of criteria that it had to follow when declaring someone a communist agent or collaborator, leaving the debate on who was a "bad" spy or a "good" spy open to interpretation. This triggered a number of public confessions from politicians and businessmen, half of whom denied knowingly working for the communist services.

Others said they were proud because they were "doing it for the country’s national security". That way, it was up to the incumbents’ own choice to decide whether to keep their public positions, just as political parties were able to choose whether to keep former communist agents on their election tickets. Some introduced a ban and some did not.

The only lustration so far came after the July 2009 elections when the newly elected Parliament adopted a ban on communist agents and collaborators taking key positions in Parliament. Such a ban, however, does not exist for Cabinet Ministers. Hence historian Bozhidar Dimitrov had to leave Parliament and was appointed Minister without portfolio.