Poland plans laws to ban communist symbols

Mar 29, 2007, 13:47 GMT

Warsaw - Poland's conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has drafted laws intended to 'remove the symbols of communist rule from public life.'

If passed by parliament, the use of the names of communist leaders for streets, schools, bridges, parks or even ships, planes and trains would be banned, Poland's TVN24 news channel reported Thursday.

The draft would also annul all medals, orders and honorary titles issued by communist authorities from 1944 until the collapse of communism in 1989.

The proposed laws are in line with a PiS drive to remove the vestiges of the communist system from life in Poland.

The ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) parliamentary opposition has voiced staunch opposition to the draft, arguing it was up to municipal governments, not Warsaw, to decide about the names of streets and character of local monuments.

Poland's highest Roman Catholic clergyman Primate Cardinal Jozef Glemp, however, has expressed support for other PiS legislative plans designed to lower the pensions of communist-era secret police agents.

'In the light of (communist-era) documents which are being revealed...I have no doubt these people were doing evil,' Glemp was quoted by the Dziennik daily.

Eighteen years after the collapse of communism in Poland, PiS Prime Minister Kaczynski has vowed to 'de-communise' public life.

Controversial vetting legislation which took effect March 15 is designed to screen as many as 700,000 public officials to determine whether they cooperated with communist-era intelligence services.

Municipal officials, university professors, legal professionals, journalists and corporate and bank chiefs born before 1972, must declare whether they were secret police informants. Liars risk being banned from their profession for up to a decade.

An earlier vetting law passed in 1997 requires senior politicians and civil servants to disclose any covert ties with communist-era spy services with a similar decade-long ban from public life for anyone caught lying.