Moral aspects of lustration on the destruction of morality by law and on unconstitutionality of certain forms of lustration

Abstract

The article discusses Polish law regulations from the years 1998–2007 designed as a basis for the process of post-communist lustration. The author analyses several acts of law to bring to the fore the assumed aims of the lustration process, its suggested scope, procedures and forms of penalization. The author’s objective is to reveal the axiological foundations of the project of lustration. In the course of his analysis the author points to the discrepancies between sentences prescribed in the lustration acts and the assumed faults of individuals. One of the striking examples of such discrepancy was the article concerning the penalization of individuals for submitting false lustration statement or for a denial to submit it. The author argues that the logic of this law was based on shifting responsibility for the evils of the former political system onto individuals who happened to live in this system and participated in it to various degrees. According to the author lustration based on a state-imposed “test of morality” bears resemblance with totalitarian systems in its attempt to invade an internal sphere of morality. The state orders to perform an action which exclusively and directly aims at realization of a strictly internal moral value, a value based on conformity between a statement and convictions, and simultaneously the state appoints itself as someone determining the content of these convictions and someone who observes and judges realization of this moral value.