Srp and Rychetský's membership cards

One of the stated reasons for judicial reform in Poland is the need to weed out ex-Communists. Aleksandra Rybinska, a Polish journalist, told ARD's Presseclub on Sun. that Solidarity expected the judges to patrol themselves and to deal with the black sheep but that this was naive and never happened. It was the Constitutional Court that blocked the lustration law, she noted. Curiously, HN wrote today that Miloš Zeman's friend Karel Srp doesn't meet the requirements for serving on the council of the ÚSTR Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes because he was in the Communist Party. Yet so were two of the Czech judges who spoke publicly against the judicial reform in Poland, Pavel Rychetský of the Constitutional Court and Pavel Šámal of the Supreme Court. It's a quirk of Czech judiciary reform that they couldn't qualify on moral grounds to serve on the ÚSTR Council but are considered pure enough to head the two highest courts in the land.