You have just visited the website of a project devoted to review court trials from post war years 1945-1948 in the reinstated Czechoslovakian democracy, with an emphasis on the retributive justice of the so called Slovak National Council. At that time in Slovakia, the illegal and illegitimate Slovak National Council established special courts (national court and people’s courts) that were within their sphere of competence supposed to deal not only with the representatives of the overthrown regime of the first Slovak Republic 1939-1945, but also with those exponents of national minorities, who had been publicly involved on behalf of their fellow-tribesmen throughout the existence of the Slovak state. The courts punished the convicts with a whole range of penalties: from a public reprimand, loss of citizen rights and forfeiture of entire property through extraordinary punishments of imprisonment to death by shooting or hanging. However, most of the court trials from that period showed clear signs of political trials.
We are launching this project symbolically 70 years after the first death sentence was carried out against Lt. Colonel Ján Šmigovský for being found guilty by these special courts of not joining the so called Slovak national uprising as a commander of the defense of the city of Nitra, thereby protecting the lives of the citizens of the city and the lives of his own soldiers as well.
Including convicted individuals it the project´s database doesn’t mean we consider them a priori and en block innocent from the point of view of the natural law which inspires the natural rights. On the contrary, it means we are only going to investigate their legal procedures and only in the case when our research has proven the innocence of the convict from the natural law’s point of view, eventually only a small degree of objective personal guilt on the crime attributed to them, we will start working on the legal preparations of the process of rehabilitation of such individual.
Unfortunately, even after 70 years since the convictions it is not possible in Slovakia to achieve judicial rehabilitation, not even after thorough revision of the political trials. By the current law of judicial rehabilitation No. 119/1990, only a person convicted after February 28 y. 1948 can be, under specific circumstances, rehabilitated.
Therefore with this project we want to, among other things, raise the pressure on the Slovak legislatures to create a legal framework for a revision of the retributive trials from years 1945-1948.
We encourage the families of the direct surviving relatives to help us collect data, necessary for the investigation of particular cases. You may find the list of the convicts, up to now included in the project, by nationality on this link. If you want to include further persons in the project or add further information to those already included, contact us in Slovak, German or Hungarian. For English click here.
For communicating sensitive information via internet, we are using secure protocol “https”. We provide professional approach, protecting the identities of both the relatives and the researchers.
