Chapter XVII: Front Matter (17)

The plan which was adopted in the Charter essentially is a severance of the general issues which would be common to all individual trials from the particular issues which would differ in each trial. The plan is comparable to that employed in certain wartime legislation of the United States, dealt with in the case of _Yakus versus United States_, in which questions as to the due process quality of the order must be determined in a separate tribunal and cannot be raised by a defendant when he is defending on indictment. Those countries which do not have written constitutions and constitutional issues may find it difficult to follow the logic of that decision, but essentially the plan was to separate general issues relative to the order as a whole from specific issues which would arise when an individual was confronted with a charge of guilt.

The general issues under this Charter are to be determined with finality in one trial before the International Tribunal, and in that trial every accused organization must be defended by counsel and must be represented by at least one leading member, and other individuals may apply to be heard. Their applications may be granted if the Tribunal thinks justice requires it. The only issue in this trial concerns the collective criminality of the organization or group. It is to be adjudicated by what amounts to a declaratory judgment. It does not decree any punishment either against the organization or against individual members.

The only specification as to the effect of this Tribunal’s declaration that an organization is criminal is contained in Article 10, which, if you will bear with me, I will read:

“In cases where a group or organization is declared criminal by
the Tribunal, the competent national authority of any Signatory
shall have the right to bring individuals to trial for
membership therein before national, military, or occupation
courts.

“In any such case the criminal nature of the group or
organization is considered proved and shall not be questioned.”

Unquestionably, it would have been competent for the Charter to have declared flatly that membership in any of these named organizations is criminal and should be punished accordingly. If there had been such an enactment, it would not have been open to an individual, who was being tried for membership, to contend that the organization was not in fact, criminal. But the framers of the Charter, acting last summer at a time before the evidence which has been adduced here was even available to us, did not care to find organizations criminal by fiat. They left that issue to determination after relevant facts were developed by adversary proceedings. Plainly, the individual is better off because of the procedure of the Charter, which leaves that finding of criminality to this body after hearings at which the organization must, and the individual may, be represented. It is at least the best assurance that we could devise, that no mistake would be made in dealing with these organizations.

Under the Charter, the groups and organizations named in the Indictment are not on trial in the conventional sense of that term. They are more nearly under investigation as they might be before a grand jury in Anglo-American practice. Article 9 recognizes a distinction between the declaration of a group or organization as criminal and “the trial of any individual member thereof.” The power of the Tribunal to try is confined to “persons,” and the Charter does not expand that term by definition, as statutes sometimes do, to include other than natural persons. The groups or organizations named in the Indictment were not as entities served with process. The Tribunal is not empowered to impose any sentence upon them as entities. For example, it may not levy a fine upon them even though they have property of the organization, nor convict any person because of membership.

It is also to be observed that the Charter does not require subsequent proceedings against anyone. It provides only that the competent national authorities shall have the right to bring individuals to trial for membership therein.

The Charter is silent as to the form that these subsequent trials should take. It was not deemed wise, on the information then available, that the Charter should regulate subsequent proceedings. Nor was it necessary to do so. There is a continuing legislative authority, representing all four signatory nations, competent to take over where the Charter leaves off. Legislative supplementation of the Charter, of course, would be necessary in any event to confer jurisdiction on local courts, to define their procedures, and to prescribe different penalties for different forms of activity.

Fear has been expressed, however, that the Charter’s silence as to future proceedings means that great numbers of members will be rounded up and automatically punished as a result of a declaration that an organization is criminal. It also has been suggested that this is, or may be, the consequence of Article II, 1(d) of Control Council Act Number 10, which defines as a crime “membership in categories of a criminal group or organization declared criminal by the International Military Tribunal.” A purpose to inflict punishment without a right of hearing cannot be spelled out of this Charter and would be offensive to both its letter and its spirit. And I do not find in Control Council Act Number 10 any inconsistency with the Charter. Of course, to reach all individual members would require numerous hearings, but they will involve only narrow issues. Many persons will have no answers to charges if they are carefully prepared; and the proceedings should be expeditious, nontechnical, and held in the locality where the person accused resides, and, incidentally, may be conducted in two languages at most.

And I think it is clear that before any person is punishable for membership in a criminal organization, he is entitled to a hearing on the facts of his case. The Charter does not authorize the national authorities to punish membership without hearing—it gives them only the right to “bring individuals to trial.” That means what it says. A trial means there is something to try.

The Charter denies only one of the possible defenses of an accused; he may not relitigate the question in a subsequent trial whether the organization itself was a criminal one. Nothing precludes him from denying that his participation was voluntary and proving that he acted under duress; he may prove that he was deceived or tricked into membership; he may show that he had withdrawn or he may prove that his name on the rolls is a case of mistaken identity.

The membership which the Charter and the Control Council Act make criminal, of course, implies a genuine membership involving the volition of the member. The act of affiliation with the organization must have been intentional and voluntary. Legal compulsion or illegal duress, actual fraud or trick of which one is a victim has never been thought to be the victim’s crime, and such an unjust result is not to be implied now. The extent of the member’s knowledge of the criminal character of the organization is, however, another matter. He may not have known on the day he joined but may have remained a member after learning the facts. And he is chargeable not only with what he knew but with all of which he was reasonably put on notice.

There are safeguards to assure that this program will be carried out in good faith. Prosecution under this declaration is discretionary. If there were purpose on the part of the Allied Powers to punish these persons without trial, it would have been already done before this Tribunal was set up, and without waiting for its declaration. We think that the Tribunal will presume that the signatory powers which have voluntarily submitted to this process will carry it out faithfully.

The Control Council Act applies only to categories of membership declared criminal. This language on the part of the Control Council recognizes a power in this Tribunal to limit the effect of its declaration. I do not think, for reasons which I will later state, that this should be construed or availed of to try any issue here as to subgroups or sections or individuals which can be tried in later proceedings. It should, I think, be construed to mean, not the sort of limitation which must be defined by evidence of details, but limitations of principle such as those I have already outlined, such as duress, involuntary membership, or matters of that kind, which the Tribunal can recognize and deal with without taking detailed evidence. It does not require this Tribunal to delve into evidence to condition its judgment to apply only to intentional and voluntary membership. This does not supplant later trials by the declaration of this Tribunal but guides them.

It certainly cannot be said that such a plan—such as we have here for severance of the general issues common to many cases from the particular issues applicable only to individual defendants for litigation in separate tribunals specially adapted for the different kinds of issues—is lacking in reasonableness or fair play. And while it presents unusual procedural difficulties, I do not think it presents any insurmountable ones. I will discuss the question of the criteria and the principles and the precedents for declaring collective criminality before coming to the procedural questions involved. The substantive law which governs the inquiry into criminality of organizations is, in its large outline, old and well settled and fairly uniform in all systems of law. It is true that we are dealing here with a procedure which would be easy to abuse and one that is often feared as an interference with liberty of assembly or as an imposition of guilt by association. It also is true that proceedings against organizations are closely akin to the conspiracy charge, which is the great dragnet of the law and rightly watched by courts lest it be abused.

The fact is, however, that every form of government has considered it necessary to treat some organizations as criminal. Not even the most tolerant of governments can permit an accumulation of private power in organizations to a point where it rivals, obstructs, or dominates the government itself. To do so would be to grant designing men a liberty to destroy liberty. The very complacency and tolerance, as well as the impotence, of the Weimar Republic towards the growing organization of Nazi power spelled the death of German freedom.

Protection of the citizen’s liberty has required even free governments to enact laws making criminal those aggregations of power which threaten to impose their will on unwilling citizens. Every one of the nations signatory to this Charter has laws making certain types of organizations criminal. The Ku Klux Klan in the United States flourished at about the same time as the Nazi movement in Germany. It appealed to the same hates, practiced the same extra-legal coercions, and likewise terrorized by the same sort of weird nighttime ceremonials. Like the Nazi Party it was composed of a core of fanatics, but it enlisted the support of respectabilities who knew it was wrong but thought it was winning. It eventually provoked a variety of legislative acts directed against such organizations as organizations.

The Congress of the United States also has enacted legislation outlawing certain organizations. A recent example was on the 28th of June 1940, when the Congress provided that it shall be unlawful for any person, among other things, to organize or help to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons to teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any government in the United States by force or violence, or to be or become a member of, or affiliate with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof.

There is much legislation by states of the American Union creating analogous offenses. An example is to be found in the act of California dealing with criminal syndicalism, which, after defining it, makes criminal any person who organizes, assists in organizing, or is, or knowingly becomes, a member of such organization.

Precedents in English law for outlawing organizations and punishing membership therein are old and consistent with the Charter.

One of the first is the British India Act Number 30, enacted in 1836, which, among other things, provides:

“It is hereby enacted that whoever shall be proved to have
belonged, either before or after the passing of this Act, to any
gang of thugs, either within or without the territories of the
East India Company, shall be punished with imprisonment for life
with hard labor.”

And the history is that this was a successful act in suppressing violence.

Other precedents in English legislation are the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799, the Seditious Meetings Act of 1817, the Seditious Meetings Act of 1846, the Public Order Act of 1936, and Defense Regulations 18(b). The latter, not without opposition, was intended to protect the integrity of the British Government against the fifth-column activities of this same Nazi conspiracy.

Soviet Russia punishes as a crime the formation of and membership in a criminal gang. Criminologists of the Soviet Union call this crime the “crime of banditry,” a term altogether appropriate to these German organizations. General Rudenko will advise this Tribunal more in detail as to the Soviet law.

French criminal law makes membership in subversive organizations a crime. Membership of the criminal gang is a crime in itself. My distinguished French colleague will present you more detail on that.

Of course, I would not contend that the law of a single country, even one of the signatory powers, was governing here, but it is clear that this is not an act or a concept of a single system of law, that all systems of law agree that there are points at which organizations become intolerable in a free society.

For German precedents, it is neither seemly nor necessary to go to the Nazi regime, which, of course, suppressed all their adversaries ruthlessly. However, under the Empire and the Weimar Republic German jurisprudence deserved respect, and it presents both statutory and juridical examples of declaring organizations to be criminal. Statutory examples are: The German Criminal Code enacted in 1871. Section 128 was aimed against secret associations, and 129 against organizations inimical to the State. A law of March 22, 1921, against paramilitary organizations. A law of July 1922 against organizations aimed at overthrowing the constitution of the Reich.