Lustration

This article deals with the technical term for the removal of politically charged employees from the (above all public) service; for the Australian thrash and black metal band of the same name, see Lustration (band) .

Lustration ( Latin , too lustrare "to make bright", "clean") describes the removal of politically burdened employees from the (especially public) service.

Word origin

In the Roman religion, lustration was the name of the solemn purifications and atonements that made up an important part of the Roman cult , but were also necessary on other contaminating occasions such as bloodshed, childbirth , touching a dead person, etc. Archaeologists also use lustration to refer to rites of other cultures and the associated institutions if they serve comparable purposes. In the Minoan culture of the Bronze Age on the island of Crete , lustration pools are known.

Application in the present

Nowadays the term is applied analogously to the removal of politically burdened employees from the public service . The examination and subsequent removal from office of employees of the former Ministry for State Security of the GDR is called a lustration process - the workplace is "cleaned" by politically charged employees. See BStU and the Stasi Documentation Act (Lustration Act).

Even in the earlier countries under Soviet influence, e.g. In the Czech Republic , Slovakia , Poland or Hungary , for example , civil servants and other public figures were checked in the early 1990s on the basis of secret service archives for possible cooperation with communist security and secret services .

The debaathification in Iraq after the fall of Hussein and the "Political Isolation Act" in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi are also viewed as lustration.

In 2014, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a law "On the Purge of the Government Apparatus", also known as the Lustration Act. This was intended to sanction or dismiss state employees who held offices under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych. Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who was elected President of Ukraine in May 2019, called in the summer of 2019 to extend the lustration law and remove all high-ranking officials who were in power under Poroshenko from public office.

literature

• Siegmar Schmidt / Gert Pickel / Susanne Pickel : Amnesia, amnesty or coming to terms with it? On dealing with an authoritarian past and human rights violations. Wiesbaden, 2009. ISBN 978-3-531-13868-8

See also

• Lustrum
• Danish lustration

Web links

Wiktionary: Lustration  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eric Brahm: Lustration. Beyond Intractability.org, June 2004
2. ↑ Mark Kersten: Libya's Political Isolation Law: Politics and Justice or the Politics of Justice? In: Middle East Institute . February 5, 2014, accessed August 4, 2015 . 
3. ↑ Ukrainian Lustration , Heinrich Böll Foundation, accessed on January 6, 2014
4. ↑ https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/osteuropa/ukraine-parlamentswahl-selenskyj-100.html
5. ↑ https://www.fr.de/politik/ukraine-will-selenskyj-seine-gegner-gesetz-kaltstellen-12821437.html
6. ↑ https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/osteuropa/ukraine-parlamentswahl-selenskyj-100.html