Anyways, before our ardent neurotikky can flaunt his lack of reading comprehension/honesty by again claiming I’m an apologist for Morel I might as well sum things up and then go on my merry way.
If Israeli law does not view Morel’s actions as genocide or war crimes, then Poland needs to go to the Hague. I do not trust Poland’s motivations entirely, I believe that there is a large political angle to this, and I feel that this is worth noting although I have, of course, never said it absolves Morel of guilt. Nuances are funny that way.
Mops
July 13, 2005, 9:04am
62
If you refer to the International Criminal Court , that court is not competent for crimes committed before 1 July 2002.
Actually, instead of the ICC I was refering to the ICJ , which I believe should be able to prosecute violations of international law (eg. the Geneva Convention).
When they are Communists.
*Let me say at this point that until the middle of 1991, there were no legal grounds and no real possibility to hold the functionaries of the Communist state accountable for the criminal death sentences and other crimes perpetrated for the sake of strengthening power in the communist Poland and crushing any sign of Polish people’s resistance against that totalitarian regime. While the principles of penal accountability of the perpetrators of nazi crimes were confirmed by the verdicts issued at the Nuremberg trials, the communist crimes have escaped judgement before international tribunals.
Hence, the surprise when Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office said that the killing of thousands of innocent Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish prisoners by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKWD) in the first days of June and July 1941 was not the case of a crime against humanity which would not be subject to statutory limitations because, I quote after the 1998 document of the Ukrainian prosecutor: “it was perpetrated following an order from the supreme Soviet authorities in Moscow.” Let us recall that the statutes of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg clearly said that acting on the order or instruction of the state authorities did not exempt from penal accountability.
This principle of penal accountability borne by those who carried out the criminal orders was also not applied to those guilty of the Katyń Crime. In the early 1990’s, the authorities of the Russian Federation passed to the Polish authorities a document with a signature of Stalin and five of his closest collaborators, dated March 5, 1940, which carried an order to kill 22,000 Polish prisoners of war who got into Soviet captivity after the Soviet invasion of September 17, 1939, against the Polish state which at that time was fighting against the Germans who had flooded the country on September 1, 1939.
The investigation conducted by the Supreme Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation in the 1990’s did not lead to a single indictment charging any of the executors of that order with having perpetrated that crime. The three actual executors were only required to make witness statements.2
As we can see, after the breakthrough of the years 1989-1990 the international community has not reached agreement on whether and by which standards judge the communist crimes in countries whose nations were victims of those crimes.3 The Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Belarus in fact denied any possibility to try the perpetrators of Communist crimes which, by their size, are comparable with the Nazi atrocities. The work by Stephane Courtois and Andrzej Paczkowski The Black Book of Communism, documents on the basis of appropriate evidence that communist crimes are, virtually, equal to nazi crimes in the scale of their unlawfulness. It is, therefore, hard to understand from the perspective of the natural legal evaluations, why those guilty of nazi and Communist crimes should get any different treatment. We should stress at this point that while the nazi crimes have been named by all the international community as the crime of genocide, the European jurisprudence does not include a single court decision in which Communist crimes would be qualified as “genocide” for which a communist villains were punished.*
Morel is just another Communist. Israel chooses to sully herself sheltering this thug…
The current investigations also include proceedings against Polish nationals who committed crimes on Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews after the war. Right now the trial continues against the former commander of the camp organised immediately after the war for German civilians in Lambinowice. The defendant, Czesław G., had committed manslaughter on German inmates only because they were German. This is clearly a crime against humanity which is not subject to limitations of prosecution, hence it can be expected that the defendant will be found guilty.
We should stress that under the current Polish law, nationality of victims, as well as nationality of the Nazi or Communist criminals, are of no importance. The very fact that the Polish law and the Polish legal doctrine have recognised legal accountability of the perpetrators of the evil committed in the name of such criminal ideologies as Nazism and Communism, no matter of the nationality of both perpetrators and the victims, I consider one of the fundamental conditions, which - when fulfilled - will allow me to say here that the Polish state - while confronting the crimes of the past - is the law abiding state.