Legislation proposed by junior coalition member TOP 09 to compensate victims of the communist regime with money deducted from the pensions of former secret police (StB) agents and top communist party functionaries has been put on hold due to concerns that the legislation would be overturned by the Constitutional Court — and difficulties defining victims.
Following three months of deliberations over the proposed law on the third resistance, the ruling coalition parties have concluded that the legislation in its current form, even it passed into law, would be overturned as unlawful by the Constitutional Court, the daily Hospodářské noviny (HN) reported on Friday.
The proposed legislation was put forward by TOP 09 at the beginning of this year and approved by top representatives of the three coalition parties (the so-called K9). One of the options considered was to impose a special tax on the pensions of former StB agents and higher Communist Party functionaries.
Potential constitutional challenge
“We came to the conclusion that in it [the proposed legislation] there are several serious doubts about its legality and could The law makers in favor of the legislation also face another problematic issue: defining who counts as a member of the so-called “third resistance”result in a challenge in the Constitution Court,” leader of TOP 09’s club of MPs, Petr Gadzík, told HN, adding that the authors of the legislation have decided to deal separately with the issues of compensating victims of the Communist regime and reducing the pensions of StB agents and high-ranking communists.
“If something could be affected, it would be the pensions of communist functionaries, but in reality no one would be able to put this together. It would be extremely complicated to create [such legislation]. Nobody has ever proposed such a thing,” Marek Benda, vice-chairman of the Civic Democrats’ (ODS) law and constitution commission, told the daily.
Nevertheless, a similar law was recently passed in Poland under the government of Donald Tusk where a challenge against the law by left-wing politicians was rejected by the country’s Constitutional Court.
According to Benda, however, the situation in the Czech Republic cannot be compared with neighboring Poland. “The Poles did it from scratch after 20 years, whereas we scrapped the bonuses for service in the StB back in 1993,” Benda explained.
The lawmakers in favor of the legislation also face another problematic issue: defining who counts as a member of the so-called “third resistance” as anti-communist activists and dissidents.
Defining resistance and victims
According to HN’s information, the working group for drafting the legislations concluded that in addition to those who took up arms against the communist regime or worked as informers for Western intelligence agencies, writers and publicists of anti-communist literature and also those who assisted anti-regime activities from abroad should also qualify as members of the third resistance.
Another issue to resolve is whether compensation for the victims of the communist regime should be delivered in a single payment, or in installments.
Before putting the bill to parliament, the authors of the legislation also want to reach an agreement with the main opposition party, the center-left Social Democrats (ČSSD). The coalition hopes to present the bill to the lower house in June.
From around 250,000 to 270,000 Czechoslovaks deemed victims of the communist regime, only around 2,000 are still alive. “They should hurry up with it while some of us are still alive,” former political prisoner and author Jiří Stranský told HN.
