The right to know

The governing Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) has suffered a setback at the hands of the Constitutional Tribunal. The tribunal has ruled that the legislative process that took place in amending the law on vetting public officials was unconstitutional and ruled the amended law invalid. It was ironic that on the very same day the Hungarians learned that their newly elected prime minister had been a communist intelligence officer in the 1970s. Following that revelation, the Hungarian government announced it would press for a law that makes public all the security services files from communist times so that their contents do not become political footballs. The original vetting law as passed in Poland is meant to ensure that politicians tell the full story about their past. They have to publicly sign a declaration that either they were informers or operatives of the security services during communism or not. They can only be debarred from public office for a set period of time if it is proved in a court of law that they lied.

If the Hungarian PM had been operating under current Polish legislation and had withheld his past from official public record, he would have automatically been removed from office. The legislation, for all the doubts about its interpretation by the courts, does punish those who do not tell the truth about their past. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Hungarian PM's past, one thing is certain: unlike Andrzej Olechowski, Poland's former foreign affairs minister and founder of the Civic Platform (PO), he did not reveal the full truth about his past to the electorate before April's knife-edge election. We will never know whether this would have changed its result. Since Hungarian law does not envisage any legal sanction he will not be punished and will be able to continue in office. However, this incident will haunt his premiership and will undermine the legitimacy of the new government. In Poland, several SLD politicians - former Prime Minister Józef Oleksy, minister Marek Wagner and Jerzy Jaskiernia, the head of the SLD parliamentary party - are accused of having lied in their signed affidavits. Their court cases are pending. If they are found guilty, their careers will be over.

This may be the reason why the ruling SLD has been trying so hard to amend the legislation. They introduced an amendment excluding the military intelligence and counter-intelligence services from the provisions of the legislation. The amendment failed in this form in the Sejm, but then was passed by the Senate and subsequently that change was upheld by the Sejm as a result of a deal between the SLD and Andrzej Lepper's Self-Defense. The Constitutional Tribunal has ruled that the Senate does not have the power to alter the nature of a Sejm bill but only to amend it. The SLD is not happy with this. Prime Minister Leszek Miller immediately picked up on the fact that this is a technicality and that four of the 15 tribunal judges had a different view. Now that the PM has decided to support increasing the membership of the Monetary Policy Council (RPP) to change its policies, who knows whether the SLD may consider campaigning for a larger Constitutional Tribunal? Since President Aleksander Kwaśniewski would view such a move with disdain, just as he has opposed meddling in the workings of the RPP, more likely is another attempt to change the vetting law in the Sejm. Probably a furious media campaign will be launched to discredit security service files. It will be followed by a political deal to repeal the legislation altogether and replace it with something like a right of public disclosure of the file contents as a sweetener to the pro-vetting lobby. The question of leading politicians' pasts has long haunted the political landscape of Central Europe. It simply is not going away. Nor should it. The voters have a right to know about the past of their present and future leaders just as they have a right to know about their financial dealings and the way they have conducted themselves throughout their public life. Serving the communist secret services was not just "doing a job." It was to serve the system's apparatus of oppression and to help in its preservation. Voters, of course, should have the right to disregard such information. If people really want to vote for former informers or secret service officers they have the democratic right to do so. Polish legislation gives them that opportunity. All it asks of the politicians is that they tell the truth in their public declaration and punishes them if they do not. As little and as much as that.

Chris Mularczyk is a Warsaw-based consultant. He can be e-mailed at cmularczyk@wbj.pl.