Office for Foreign Relations and Information 

Starting today, the UPN will make available scanned lists of the files produced by the StB agents. UPN member Michal Dzurjanin has said that the list will be complete and it will include the information about the files of all informers of the StB as well as the people whom it considered dangerous and persecuted.

The Czech lists, published on March 20, 2003, only contain the collaborators registered by the StB in the categories resident, agent, informer, holder of a borrowed or safe house. The Slovak lists will also feature the category informer and candidate of secret collaboration. This group of collaborators was removed from the list by the Constitutional Court in 1991, which ruled that these people did not always know about their collaboration.

As a result, it may happen that a person registered as an informer of the StB in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (e.g., after having moved), will appear on the list of the UPN, but not at the Czech Interior Ministry, Jan Frolik, the director of its archives service, told CTK. Frolik said that the registers had existed in individual regions and after Czechoslovakia´s split, Slovakia accepted the files of regional authorities in Slovakia.

There is also a difference in the rights to look directly into a specific file. In the Czech Republic, only a Czech citizen has access to his own personal file. However, in the case of StB collaborators, anyone, including foreigners, can see it, Frolik said. In Slovakia, the file can only be seen by the person in question, but it does not have to be a Slovak citizen.

In Czech lists, one cannot find any foreigners. Since the law does not allow for this, the citizenship of these people was checked and all foreign nationals were deleted. The UPN adopted a similar strategy. However, after the citizenship was checked, it referred to the position of the office for the protection of personal data and included the lists about foreigners at the Internet pages. It only erased the dates of birth.

The spokesman for the Czech civilian counter-intelligence (UZSI), Bohumil Srajer, told CTK that the secret service considers the protection of foreigners as right. "The service wants to protect the security of the people who live both on the territory of the allies and in high-risk regions," Srajer said. Moreover, the UZSI did not want to intervene in the law of foreign countries, he added.

The question of documents of the former Communist intelligence is still controversial. The list of files administered by this part of the StB is also available on the Interior Ministry Internet pages. Slovakia is not considering taking this step. Dzurjanin said that some files about Slovaks were still in the Czech Republic.

The UPN is still accepting documents from the Slovak SIS counter-intelligence, who has administered them since 1993. "If the SIS wants to keep some secret before us, it must be agreed on by the parliamentary committee for human rights and ethnic minorities," Dzurjanin said. The UPN is to accept all the documents by the end of the year, he added.