The decrees issued by former Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes, later enacted as laws, stripped most ethnic Germans and many Hungarians in Czechoslovakia of property and citizenship after World War Two.

Austrian politicians also pointed out that the Austrian-Czech inter-parliamentary commission dealing with the safety issues of the Temelin Czech nuclear power plant should serve as a model for a dialogue on the Benes decrees.

However, representatives of he Czech government and opposition parties claim they consider the decrees closed.

The Czech Foreign Ministry has not commented on the Austrian proposal.

"It is a parliamentary initiative so we will leave a possible reaction up to parliament. We do not want to interfere in its affairs," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zuzana Opletalova told CTK.

"It [Benes decrees] is a closed chapter," Chamber of Deputies chairman Miloslav Vlcek (senior opposition Social Democrats, CSSD) told CTK.

Lower house deputy chairpersons, Miroslava Nemcova (senior ruling Civic Democrats, ODS) and Jan Kasal (junior government Christian Democrats, KDU-CSL), share this opinion.

"I do not consider this idea good at all. It would not improve, but rather worsen bilateral relations," said Nemcova commenting on the Austrian initiative.

She recalled that the Czech-German declaration of 1997 resolved the issues of the joint past, concerning World War Two and the events that had preceded and followed it.

Kasal said he does not know what stance the Czech parliament would take since deputies had not yet dealt with the Austrian appeal officially. He, however, anticipated that the initiative would not be welcomed.

Representatives of Austrian political parties, except for the Greens, released a document on Tuesday, calling on the Slovak and Czech parliaments to open a dialogue on the Benes decrees on a top level.

The Austrian politicians also agreed that the deportation and expropriation of the Sudeten and Carpathian Germans based on general and ethnically motivated condemnations was injustice.

They at the same time criticised it as discriminatory that ethnic Germans were exempted from the restitution bills in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. They stressed that the Benes decrees and the amnesty law from 1946, pardoning the excesses committed by Czechs against Germans in the wild stage of the post-war transfer, "sharply violate EU moral and legal standards."