Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski on Thursday announced a new drive to tackle the country's communist past, saying former members of the secret police should lose benefits such as pensions.
Kaczynski said that his Law and Justice party planned legislation that would "free Poland of the last traces of communism by removing all the privileges of individuals responsible for the crimes and repression of the totalitarian state."
The draft law would also class the reviled communist-era secret police, or Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB), as a "criminal" organization, he said.
The former SB has been back in the spotlight in recent weeks after revelations about its past links with members of Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church.
The newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, stepped down on Sunday after the media exposed his years of collaboration with the SB, which sought to recruit priests to inform on parishioners and fellow churchmen.
The Wielgus scandal and cases involving other priests have dented the image of the Church, which played a leading role in opposing Poland's four-decade communist regime.
Kaczynski, a conservative Catholic and former anti-communist activist, said it was high time for a crackdown on ex-SB members themselves.
"It is a question not only of condemning those who collaborated with the former secret police, but above all those who made up and ran it," he told journalists.
"Today we have a situation where those who were most guilty don't suffer the consequences at all. On the contrary, they are privileged, thanks to things such as special pensions," he added.
Kaczynski said his party would submit draft legislation "in coming weeks" requiring the publication of the names of former SB staff and barring them from public life.
The draft law would also cut their pensions to the national monthly minimum of around 800 zlotys (US$270). Currently, former SB staff can receive several thousand zlotys per month.
Unlike neighboring Czech Republic, which moved swiftly to punish former regime members, Poland has not cracked down hard in the years since the end of communism in 1989. Nor has it thrown open its secret police archives to the public.
But Kaczynski and his twin brother Lech, who is president of Poland, made casting off the nation's communist past once and for all a major plank of their successful election campaigns last year.
The latest initiative would fine tune a law which aims to expose anyone in public life and a swathe of professions who collaborated with the SB.
That legislation, which is set to come into force in coming months, is expected to affect around 400,000 people.
Elected officials, top civil servants and journalists will be among those required to apply to the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) -- set up in 1998 to prosecute Nazi and communist crimes -- for a certificate saying whether or not they collaborated with the SB.
The IPN, which holds the country's communist-era files, will publish details of affected individuals. People who feel they have been unfairly labeled will be able to turn to the courts.
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