Prague, 8 November – On 7 November the Appeal for a Nuremberg of Communism (Bukovsky-Cristin document) was introduced in the Senate of the Italian Republic in Rome by Prof. Renato Cristin, Prof. Roberto de Mattei, Dr. Dario Fertilio, senator Adolfo Urso, senator Lucio Malan and Vito Comencini.

It is an international initiative promoted by Renato Cristin (University of Trieste, Italy), which expresses an idea of recently passed former dissident Vladimir Bukovskij, whereby Communism would receive the historical and moral judgment of irrevocable condemnation that Nazism has rightly received.

The thirtieth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall is an opportunity to make a contribution not only to historical memory, but also to the concrete elaboration of a wide-ranging anti-totalitarian culture that looks to the future, with the aim of initiating a process that has the meaning and value of a Nuremberg of Communism.

“Communism did not fall with the Berlin Wall. This ideology is still alive in the world, in states and parties that are openly communist and in political and cultural thought that minimizes and tries to erase the crimes of communism, as if it were a good idea which only happened to coincide with the rise of one brutal regime after another across decades and continents…” (from the Appeal).

The Appeal receives large international support. Among the first 200 signatories is Antonio Tajani (former president and currently member of the European Parliament, Italy), Prof.Stéphane Courtois (historian, author of the Black Book of Communism, France), Robert R. Reilly (director of the Westminster Institute, former director of The Voice of America, former member of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, USA), Mart Laar (former prime minister and chairman of the supervisory Board of the Bank of Estonia), Erhard Busek (former vice-chancellor of the Austrian Republic, Austria), Vladimir Kara-Murza (Chairman, Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, Russia) and many others.

Full text of the appeal can be found here or below on this page

The Platform of European Memory and Conscience joins and supports this initiative because it is in line with its goals and projects. In 2014, for example, the project Justice 2.0 – International Justice for the Imprescriptible Crimes of Communism was introduced, the purpose of which is to raise international awareness about the issue of unpunished international crimes of Communism and to contribute to finding ways of achieving international justice for these crimes, etc. Currently the investigation of the killings along the former Iron Curtain is ongoing in Germany and Poland in cases of those Germans and Poles who tried to escape and were killed by the Communist border guards in former Czechoslovakia.

“The Platform is in fact the only organisation capable of preparing such tribunal in symbolic way, and the experience of our members seems to be crucial to do it in a legal way,”says Łukasz Kamiński, President of the Platform and one of the signatories.

The other Platform representatives and member organisation signatories include María Schmidt (director of the Institute of the Twentieth Century, director of the House of Terror, Hungary), Paweł Ukielski (former deputy president of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland, current deputy director of the Warsaw Rising Museum), Andreja Valič Zver (member of the Executive Board of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, Slovenia), Marion Smith (executive director, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, USA), Ana Blandiana (writer, president of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism from Sighet, Romania), Ronaldas Račinskas (executive director, Secretariat of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation regimes in Lithuania, Prof. Antoine Arjakovsky (historian, Research director, Collège des Bernardins, Paris, France), Wolfgang-Christian Fuchs (president, Inter-Asso, Germany),Jonila Godole (executive director, Institute for Democracy, Media & Culture, Albania), Robert Kostro (director, Polish History Museum, Poland), Gjon Radovani (chairman of the Board, MEMO Center, Albania), Florian Razvan-Mihalcea (president, Timisoara Society, Romania), Milos Suchma (president, Czech and Slovak Association of Canada), Marek Mutor (director, History Centre Zajezdnia, Poland), Dr Jarosław Szarek (President of the Institute of National Remembrance, Poland), Johann Grünbauer (chairman, Foundation History of Totalitarian Regimes and their Victims, Netherlands).