(MENAFN) The Czech Republic has amended its criminal code to ban the promotion of communism, equating it legally with Nazi ideology. President Petr Pavel, a former member of the Communist Party, signed the legislation into law on Thursday.

Under the new rules, individuals who “establish, support, or promote Nazi, communist, or other movements that clearly aim to suppress human rights or incite hatred based on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or class” face prison sentences ranging from one to five years.

The amendment was prompted by the Czech government-funded Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Co-author Michael Rataj argued that it is unfair to treat communism differently from Nazism, noting that many Czechs still see Nazism as a foreign German crime while excusing communism as “their own” ideology.

The Czech Republic, which became independent after the 1989 Velvet Revolution and the breakup of communist Czechoslovakia in 1993, has actively removed Soviet-era monuments, accelerating this after the 2014 coup in Ukraine. Similar decommunization laws have been enacted in other Eastern European countries such as Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania—moves criticized by Moscow as attempts to rewrite history.

Russia has maintained that such laws distort the reality of World War II, during which the Soviet Union suffered tremendous losses fighting Nazi Germany. In response, President Vladimir Putin signed a 2021 law banning any public comparison of the USSR with Nazi Germany and prohibiting denial of the Soviet role in defeating fascism.

The Czech Communist Party (KSCM) has strongly opposed the legislation, calling it a politically motivated effort to marginalize dissent and potentially exclude the party from upcoming elections.

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