Monday, April 9, 2007

Waiting for Freedom, Messing It Up

In meantime, in Poland Big Brother is still watching:

The latest idea of the Polish governing coalition is “lustration,” which means looking for and eventually barring from public life all people found to have been secret collaborators with the security services between 1944 and 1990. The search will last as long as 17 years and will affect approximately 700,000 people, including jurists, bank managers, members of boards, civil servants, researchers and journalists. Everyone has to declare whether he used to be a collaborator. If someone refuses to make such a declaration or makes an untruthful one, he is barred from working in his field for 10 years.

Taken from Adam Michnik's article for the NYT about "lustration".