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Slovakia moves towards prosecuting communist-era criminals

13.12.2007

BRATISLAVA, Dec 13, 2007 (AFP) - Slovakia took its first steps Thursday towards investigating cases of murder or torture committed under its former communist regime and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
Details of four cases from the 1950s to the late 1980s have been lodged with the Slovak procurator, a legal representative, the National Memory Institute (UPN) announced at a press conference in Bratislava.
"These are crimes which the former regime did not punish precisely because they were committed in order to strengthen the regime," said Ivan Petransky, the UPN's director.
"We informed the general procurator of the facts suggesting who carried out these crimes (...) and through their verification we can find out how these crimes were committed," Michal Dzurjanin, spokesman for the institute, told AFP.
No one has yet been charged with communist-era crimes since the institute was created after the split of the former Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
Two of the first cases to be presented involve the suspected repression by the communist secret police -- the StB -- of the church and its members.
The third case involves fabricated charges brought against Valeria Matulayova, who was convicted of state subversion in 1962 and is believed to have been physically and mentally tortured in a manner harking back to the worst Stalinist-era practices of the 1950s.
The fourth case covers the suspected torture of Florian Gaal who was thrown out of a window during an interrogation.
StB police members believed to be responsible for these abuses have been identified, but their names will not be published because it "would not help the investigation," said Lubomir Morbacher, director of the UPN documentation service.
The office is preparing further cases "concerning people killed while trying to cross the Iron Curtain," Dzurjanin said.
The institute, however, criticised the interior ministry for not presenting more than 500 hundred documents about secret police members.
It was set up in 2002 to provide access to undisclosed records of the activities of repressive organs of the former Slovak and Czechoslovak states in the period from 1939 to 1989.

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