The Criminalisation of History. Lustration, Litigation and Compensation in the Czech, Polish and Hungarian Practice (1989-2012)

The study outlines the practice of ‘history policy’ of the Czech, Polish and Hungarian political right in the past 20 years. This summary is a reaction to the frontal attack on national history by the Hungarian right wing government, which declared the period 1944-1989 as criminal, expelling it from the thousand year long history of Hungary. Although this phenomenon is not typically Hungarian – there were also attempts in the Czech Republic and Poland for biased reinterpretations – the criminalisation of history is uniquely extreme here.