To Suit the Case

After a whirlwind trip to Europe, Robert Houghwout (rhymes with plow it) Jackson last week summarized the U.S. policy on war crimes. Its salient features (promptly approved by President Truman) :

P:"... An inescapable responsibility rests upon this country to conduct an inquiry, preferably in association with others, but alone if necessary...."

P: The trials must be fair. But ". . . these hearings may properly bar obstructive and dilatory tactics resorted to by defendants in ordinary trials."

P: The U.S. specifically rejects the old doctrines that 1) heads of states are immune, and 2) their subordinates are immune because they merely obeyed orders. Said Jackson: "There is more than a suspicion that this idea [of immunity] is a relic of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. ... We do not accept the paradox that legal responsibility should be the least where power is the greatest." Jackson fell back on Britain's 17th Century jurist, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, and his declaration to King James I that a king is "under God and the law."

P: Prosecutor Jackson faced the fact that the victors have very little written law to work with, brusquely proposed to remedy that deficiency by making law to suit the case. Said he: ". . . International law as taught in the 19th and the early . . . 20th Century generally declared that war-making was not illegal and no crime at law. ... Unless we are prepared to abandon every principle of growth for international law, we cannot deny that our own day has its right to institute customs and to conclude agreements that will themselves become sources of a newer and strengthened international law."

Chances were that the U.S., Britain and other western powers would act together. Britain's Lord Wright, chairman of the willing but impotent United Nations War Crimes Commission, said that he still hoped for Russian cooperation. But he added: ". . . At the moment it cannot be said that this is an immediate practicable matter."

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