New democracies everywhere have struggled in the search for justice for the crimes of past regimes.

The ruling also carries important lessons for other new democracies that are seeking to deal with crimes of past regimes.

First, they mark the reappearance of tactics long associated with those past Soviet regimes from which the present leadership has appeared to distance itself.

He added that past regimes "were unable to clean things up because they were the very people doing the stealing."

He has given this team the discipline it needed when the past regimes were kind of chaotic.

The past regime started some thing, for whatever reason.

"We had cold, hunger and terror," was the way one of the papers, Free Youth, described the past regime.

"The situation is better than before, and we are freed from all things under the past regime."

I agree they helped us get rid of the past regime, but they should not take away our dignity.

Such protests would have been impossible under past military regimes, when opposition leaders were systematically abducted and killed.