The Institute
Legal framework for the establishment and operation of the Institute
In agreement with the Governmental Decree no. 1 372/18.11.2009, further amended by the Governmental Decree no. 134/23.02.2010, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania (IICCR) merged with the National Institute for the Memory of the Romanian Exile (NIMRE) into a new institution, namely the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMRE).
MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THE INSTITUTE:
- to administer and analyse, in a rigorous and scientific manner, the memory of the communist regime in Romania, as well as its consequences;
- to support the setting-up of educational tools destined to analyse the memory of the communist period, and to encourage the development of a culture based on liberty, democracy and the rule of law;
- to cultivate and promote scientific research and advanced studies in the field of the history of communism by means of critical and comparative methods as well as by following international standards;
- to collect, archive and publish documents referring to the Romanian exile in the interval 1940-1989.
THE INSTITUTE AIMS:
- to analyse the nature, the purpose, and the effects of the totalitarian regime in Romania during 1945-1989, as well as its memory within the Romanian diaspora before and after the communist period;
- to collect data, documents, and testimonies regarding all actions which led to the infringement of human rights and liberties during the communist regime;
- to render evident the intellectual sources of the communist doctrine, the genealogy of totalitarian thought and practices, the structures of the Communist Party before and after 1945, the institutional definition of the former Securitate, as well as the repressive mechanisms in socialist Romania;
- to analyse the institutional significance and the main political events of 1990 in the context of democratisation and especially with respect to breaching individual rights and liberties;
- to identify the ideological networks and the international partnerships promoted by the Communist Party and the persons responsible for the ideology and the propaganda of the totalitarian state;
- to make public the acts of violence, the abuses and the crimes carried out from the direct order of the Communist Party;
- to organise memorial exhibitions, book launchings and public debates regarding the place of the memory of communism within the symbolic geography of Romanian culture;
- to support scholarly research, in Romania and abroad, related to the Romanian exile;
- to identify, bring back to Romania and preserve the documents referring to the former exile, either originals or copies, on any storage means;
- to finance the editing, reediting and publishing of memoirs, books, studies, articles, correspondence, photographic and video testimonies, collections of documents and photographic albums referring to the former Romanian exile;
- to offer material support to those institutions of the former exile that must function abroad as active representatives of Romania.