Dealing with the crimes of the Stalin era

The EU justice ministers have agreed on the basic framework for a pan-European law against racism which will make inciting racial hatred and denying genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity punishable by law. Askolds Rodins points out that the crimes committed by the Stalin regime are not included in the list. "The reason for this is that there has yet to be an international legal ruling on these crimes. But at least the European Commission has given the go-ahead for a hearing about what the Red Army really got up to during the Stalin era in the so-called 'liberated territories'. Over the past twenty years much has been said and written in Latvia about how 'the world doesn't understand us' and how 'poorly we have explained our history'. Now we can see that we're not alone in this respect, because this also applies to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. We now have the opportunity to bring international justice to focus on one of the most bloody totalitarian regimes in history."

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