Suchergebnisse

During the past decade & a half, calls for the "natural" restitution of residential property (houses & apartments) abusively confiscated by the communist regime during the period 1945-89 were left unanswered by the post-communist Romanian authorities. The lack of political will to address the problem adequately & fairly, the arbitrary reversal of definitive court orders, & legislation consistently favouring the tenants have persuaded an increasing number of Romanian home-owners to lodge complaints with the European Court of Human Rights. Since 1999, the Court has awarded most owners their houses, but the Romanian authorities have disregarded the verdicts. The result, in some cases, is that justice delayed is justice denied. Tables. Adapted from the source document.

Observers have argued that the window of opportunity allowing for the adoption of transitional justice methods in Eastern Europe had closed by mid-1990s, both because by then the public had lost interest in the topic and because former communist officials and secret political police officers retained their political clout and it to block an honest reassessment of the recent past. However, it was only toward the end of the decade that Poland adopted lustration, opened secret archives and investigated a number of communist-era atrocities, proving that, if there is political will, justice delayed might not amount to justice denied. This article examines three methods post-communist Poland has employed in order to come to terms with the communist past -lustration, secret file access and court proceedings- and offers four different explanatory factors that, when taken together, can explain the country's reluctance to pursue the politics of memory more resolutely.

Since 1989, lustration has figured prominently among the methods post-communist Eastern Europe used to deal with its recent past. While to date the literature has recognized that countries like the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Albania and, more recently, Poland, have screened electoral candidates and/or members of the judiciary, the army and the police forces, in order to remove officials with a tainted past from post-communist politics, Romania has been dismissed as a country which consistently rejected lustration. However, calls for the removal of communist officials and secret political police agents were voiced soon after the Revolution of December 1989, and the measures they called for were more comprehensive both in terms of the social categories subjected to and the time period of the ban. This article is the first in-depth analysis to examine the lustration demands included in the Timişoara Declaration, explain the reasons why they received a cold shoulder from formations spanning the entire political spectrum, and map the negotiations between political parties and the civil society for the renewal of the political class. Romania missed the window of opportunity to legislate lustration because of such factors as its bloody exit from communism, the inability of the pro-democratic opposition to wrestle power from the successor of the Communist Party, and its predominantly subject political culture.