Victims of the Iron Curtain Project – Project Analysis
Victims of the Iron Curtain Project – project analysis Text by: Martin Slávik, Wojciech Bednarski When the newly constituted United Nations organisation adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948, a charter driven by the need to prevent the repetition of the horrors of WWII, the Soviet Union and its satellite countries abstained from voting. From their seizure of power after WWII until their fall in 1989-1991, the Communist dictatorships in the so-called Eastern bloc violated all articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on a daily basis, committing the worst crimes and atrocities against their own citizens. Until the fall of the regime, people living in the Eastern bloc were denied the most fundamental human rights: the right to life, liberty and security, freedom from slavery, freedom from torture and inhumane treatment, equality before the law, the right to justice, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, the right to own property, the right to education, freedom to choose a profession, active and passive voting rights. People lived in a permanent situation of lawlessness, state crime and fear, and yet that was a time regarded by the international community as a time of peace. During the Communist dictatorship in Europe, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were executed, killed or deported, millions were imprisoned, tortured or forced to perform slave labour and tens of millions of people were subjected to other unlawful, and inhumane treatment or persecution. One big group of people who suffered under the Communist regimes were those who wanted to live in freedom, so they tried to leave their countries and their only option was to escape “illegally”.1 The “Victims of the Iron Curtain” project focuses on the group of people who were killed, wounded or arrested by the border guards troops during their attempt to escape from a Communist country.
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