A Czech university official lost his job last month under a law that bars former collaborators with the Communist secret police from holding all public administration jobs except as government ministers.
Charles University Law School fired Vice Dean Michal Tomasik in January under the so-called Purge Law of 1991, which has been criticized for statute of limitations and double standards.
But billionaire Prime Minister Andrej Babis and Culture Minister Otto Klemper, both in office since last December, continue to work despite being registered as collaborators in the 1980s.
Joseph Melnik, a political analyst at Charles University, told AFP: “There is a contradiction in the law. It does not concern members of the government, but it concerns others.”
“It is not really convincing to insist that someone because of his sordid past cannot be a minister, because the past is not an issue here,” said lawyer Jan Kysela.
The law was passed in 1991 to prevent former secret police employees and their collaborators from becoming senior military officers, university officials, judges, and government ministers.
It was adopted two years after the former Czechoslovakia emerged from four decades of totalitarian communist rule, and two years before it was divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Melnik said it had a practical purpose: “It was necessary to remove people associated with the previous regime from the administration… to prevent them from holding high positions and joining networks that are harmful to the new democratic regime.”
Tens of thousands of secret police collaborators were exposed after the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
Since then, candidates for public administration jobs must present a so-called purification certificate issued by the Ministry of the Interior.
But the law was relaxed in 2014 when an amendment exempted government ministers from this duty, the year Babis became finance minister.
– “Sails” –
The StB file from 1982 bears the signature of Slovakian-born Babis under the pseudonym “Bures”, a rather common surname.
Babis, Czech finance minister from 2014-2017 and prime minister from 2017-2021, insisted he never signed and filed a lawsuit against the Slovak institute that oversees his StB file, but the courts dismissed all lawsuits.
In 2024, the Slovak Interior Ministry decided that Babis had been “illegally registered as an agent of StB”, leading to him being officially cleared of the charges.
But critics complained that this was Babis’s deal with Slovakia’s pro-Russian Prime Minister Robert Fico, his close ally.
Unlike Papis, Klemper, a former singer, admitted to collaborating with StB in the 1980s, saying in a recent podcast that he made the recording after StB “scared me to death.”
“I apologized to everyone. I forgave my tormentors and then I tried to forgive myself,” he recently told Czech public television, which broadcast an interview with a man Klemper had reported to StB for marijuana possession in the 1980s.
Dismissed law professor Tomasek, accused of reporting on Czechoslovak dissidents in France in the 1980s according to Czech media, declined to comment on the case to AFP.
He said only that he and his family “feel exhausted by the current media campaign.”
– ‘Pretty much gone’ –
Libor Svoboda, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, described the law as a “patchwork” in its current form but acknowledged that it had accomplished its mission in the past.
“The number of people affected by this law continues to decline because those who were of active age in the 1980s are now largely gone,” Svoboda told AFP.
The Constitutional Court said in 2001 that “over time, the relative importance of the views and positions of people in a totalitarian state has certainly not disappeared, but has certainly diminished.”
Kysela told AFP that the purge law has greater moral value than legal value at present.
“It is not entirely appropriate to believe that someone who worked in the previous regime 40 years ago… represents a real danger to Czech democracy,” he said.
frj/cw
This article was generated from an automated news feed without any modifications to the text.
