Countries of the former Warsaw Pact

The recent 250 years in the history of the former Warsaw Pact countries are a story of foreign domination. In the 19th century, most of them remained under jurisdiction of foreign penal legislation (Austrian, German, and Russian). Only Romania and Bulgaria, but also Hungary within the Habsburg monarchy, introduced their own penal codes. This penal legislation usually remained in force after these countries regained independence after the First World War. Only Poland and Romania adopted new penal codes before the outbreak of the Second World War. Following the “liberation” of the region by the Red Army (1944–1945), new communist regimes quickly introduced penal legislation modelled on Soviet ideas. Until the mid-1950s, it retained an extremely repressive character and served as an instrument of crude political repression. Over the following period, some liberalisation occurred, but the so-called “socialist penal law” retained its authoritarian and punitive character. The collapse of the communist systems at the end of the 1980s, and the democratic transformation of the region, included broad reforms of penal law and criminal justice systems to follow European standards. Regretfully, more recent populist and illiberal tendencies that have occurred in some of these countries are becoming a serious obstacle for penal law reform.