A quarter of a century ago Vlasta Formánková, then a 26-year-old judge in communist Czechoslovakia, sentenced a pub manager to 10 months in jail. The man's crime: telling a meeting of party functionaries that he did not want to hear their "communist drivel" and ejecting them from his bar.

Formánková spent the following years progressing through the ranks of the judiciary, and earlier this month President Václav Klaus appointed her to the Constitutional Court.

But Formánková's past refuses to go away. Her appointment — to a post that requires "a character beyond reproach" — has been attacked by some of her fellow judges, sparked protests from former political prisoners and highlighted the country's continuing problems in coming to terms with its communist history.

Formánková's case has also prompted media reports that more than 20 lawyers who prosecuted dissidents still work as state attorneys.

That is unacceptable to some.

"My colleague Formánková shouldn't have become a Constitutional Court justice," said Jaromír Jirsa, president of the Czech Union of Judges. "Her ruling long ago, even if it was made out of youthful impulsiveness, discredited her to such an extent that for me personally, and for a number of fellow citizens, she will not be a trustworthy constitutional judge."

Haunting pasts

The controversy over the pasts of legal officials has been sharpened by a revelation that Prague High Court Judge Jitka Horová figures on an Interior Ministry list of people who collaborated with the communist-era secret police, the StB.

Horová, who has been suspended, denies the allegation and plans to take legal action against the Interior Ministry.

Justice Minister Pavel Němec has ordered checks on the files of another 60 judges to be carried out by the end of August. The country has around 1,100 prosecutors and 2,900 judges, according to the Justice Ministry.

"If we discover more cases of judges with a positive [vetting] record, we will propose that such a person be dismissed from his function" pending a disciplinary hearing, said Justice Ministry spokesman Petr Dimun.

Under a 1991 screening law, passed two years after the fall of the country's communist regime, judges, state prosecutors and others working in senior public administration posts must produce certificates stating they did not cooperate with the secret police or hold influential positions in the Communist Party.

Judge Horová's alleged record of collaboration apparently went unnoticed until this year.

Meanwhile, justices like Formánková remain free to progress in their careers because legal officials cannot be dismissed merely for having imprisoned anti-communist dissidents.

However, Justice Minister Němec "believes that such people should not be employed in senior positions," said Dimun.

Iva Brožová, chairwoman of the Supreme Court, has a similar opinion.

"It's not right" that such people work in the justice system, she told The Prague Post.

Formánková has admitted that her verdict on the pub manager in 1980 was an error and pointed out she had been an inexperienced judge at the time, but this has not quieted the controversy.

TV Nova reported Aug. 7 that it had obtained a list of 22 state attorneys who participated in the prosecution of dissidents before 1989. The Justice Ministry said that three people on the list work for the Supreme State Attorney's Office, and ordered an audit of how the office employs its staff.

Supreme State Attorney Marie Benešová — who has recently crossed swords with Justice Minister Němec in a number of high-profile disputes — said she has "no knowledge that there are morally unfit people working as state attorneys at the Supreme Attorney's office. Any such speculations about particular people have to be supported by real evidence that they indeed persecuted dissidents, rather than a purpose-made 'witch hunt.'"

Vetting limits

Clearing out every judge tainted by a communist past is not feasible, according to Mathew Heim, a lawyer and expert on European judicial reform from The Centre, a Brussels think tank.

"One has to balance the ideal situation of starting afresh with the practical difficulties of finding qualified and experienced judges," he said. "If you want a country to run, it's impossible to have a clean sweep."

Čestmír Čejka, a spokesman for the Confederation of Political Prisoners, disagrees. He argues that the current vetting rules, known as the lustration laws, are not thorough enough.

"We have plenty of attorneys in this country to replace judges," he said. "The problem is that there is no will within the judiciary to cleanse itself."

Aside from moral objections, Čejka said, some judges with questionable pasts raise another problem: They could be vulnerable to blackmail. "They'll try to avoid legal decisions that someone could attack by pointing to their past," he said. "It is not clear how many judges have a past in the Communist Party."

Jirsa of the Czech Union of Judges counters that the justice system underwent a wide-ranging cleanup in the early 1990s, when about half of all judges left "either for political reasons or commercial reasons," many in search of higher pay in the new private sector.

"The judges' community became considerably newer and younger. Among judges today, there are not many that compromised themselves under the former regime," Jirsa said.

Meanwhile, Petr Uhl, a former dissident who spent nine years in prison before 1989, said he opposes tightening lustration legislation because it depends partly on secret police records that can't be relied on as accurate.

"I've given much thought to what a good lustration law would have to look like, and I've concluded there's no such thing," said Uhl, who after the collapse of communism became the first Czech human rights commissioner and who now works as a newspaper columnist.

Instead of a general screening law that automatically disqualifies those with "positive" vetting results, Uhl said he favors giving civil service employers the right to look into applicants' secret police files to assess their past.

Vojtěch Cepl, a former Constitutional Court justice and now a professor of law at Charles University who helped draft both the Czech Republic's constitution and its lustration rules, said this country has one of the most rigorous screening procedures in the former Eastern bloc.

Poland and Bulgaria use similar measures, he said, though the Poles did not preserve communist-era records as thoroughly as the Czechs.

"Hungary still has no lustration law, but there's a big debate and a political group is pressing for it," Cepl added. "Slovakia had a lustration law [before the country split from Czech Republic in 1993] but it is now effectively dead; it is not enforced."