ABSTRACT. Williams and Fowler examine how lustration has been handled in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, testing three frameworks that have been developed to account for why and how emerging democracies deal with their non-democratic past. Horne writes that lustration laws, within the historical context of CEE transitions, could and positively contribute to democratic consolidation. Kaminski and Nalepa contend that, in several cases, the post-Communist successors of the old regime passed laws that seemingly inflicted substantial and im- mediate political harm on themselves.