The MEPs of the KKE denounced the new escalation of anti-communist bans and persecution in Poland, focusing on the changes in the country’s Criminal Code. MEP Lefteris Nikolaou-Alavanos addressed a question to the European Commission.

The Polish government, by revising the Criminal Code, punishes with up to three years’ imprisonment any person who, among other things, “publicly promotes” or “produces, records or imports, possesses, sells, offers, stores, keeps, presents, transfers or displays in printed, electronic or any other form (...) communist symbols and ideas”.

It also promotes the unacceptable and unhistorical equation of the monster of Nazism with socialism–communism.

The above will come into force at the beginning of March 2023; thus, anyone in possession of a book, a poster or a historical film, even from Poland’s own recent 20^th century history, will be potentially guilty and face prison sentences.

The MEPs of the KKE denounce that “the reactionary Polish government is destroying Soviet monuments to peace, the anti-fascist struggle, solidarity of peoples, against war, while praising and paying tribute to Nazi collaborators. The EU and NATO, with the Polish bourgeoisie on the front line, are arming the hand of fascist groups such as the ‘Azov Battalion’ in Ukraine, accepting Stepan Bandera and his ilk as ‘liberators’.

Those who are persecuted throughout time are the Communists and the Communist ideology. Communist parties are facing bans. The right to free political expression and ideological–political debate and confrontation is affected in over a third of the EU Member States, including Poland, where members and cadres of the Communist Party of Poland have repeatedly faced persecution, bans, and trials for having committed the ‘crime’ of publishing a newspaper. The same applied for university professors who organized university seminars on Marxism, and even demonstrators wearing a shirt with Lenin’s picture on it.”

Based on the above, the MEP addressed the following questions:

“What is the Commission’s position:

- On the criminalization of the right to free political expression and action of communists and the people, which is taking on the characteristics of a real witch-hunt both in Poland and in 1/3 of the EU countries?

- On the de facto ban on communist ideology and action and, by extension, the ban on the action of the Communist Party, which consistently struggles for the interests of the workers and the people?

- On the demand that all persecutions against communists be stopped now, that all anti-communist laws prohibiting the activity of the CPs that violate fundamental people’s freedoms in Poland, the Baltic countries, and other EU member states, be abolished?”.

21.12.2022