Justice Minister Ewald Bucher today told the American Jewish Committee president, Morris B. Abram, that his office will examine the possibilities of an extension of the May 8, 1965 cutoff date of the Statute of Limitations for war criminals. He said that such a reconsideration might be based on the fact that “under German law, one might reasonably consider some later date than May 8, 1945 for the Statute of Limitations to begin.”
During his meeting with the Justice Minister, Mr. Abram said that both German and international law provide ample basis for moving the Statute of Limitations cutoff date to 1975. “Because of the patent inability of the German Government fully to prosecute war criminals until its sovereignty was truly established in 1955,” he pointed out, “it can and should consider 1955 as the starting date for the 20-year limitation period.”
Failure of the West German Government to extend the Statute of Limitations, Mr. Abram told the Bonn Minister of Justice, “would be legally indefensible and morally unjustifiable.” Mr. Abram came here from Geneva where he attended the United Nations Sub commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities as the United States member.
Mr. Abram, who is a prominent constitutional lawyer and served on the prosecution staff of the Nuremberg trials, conferred with the West German Minister of Justice three days after the latter reiterated his opposition to extending the deadline for prosecution of Nazi war criminals after next May 8. Only this weekend the minister criticized harshly Jewish demonstrations in the United States and in Israel in behalf of postponing the effective date of the statute of limitations for prosecution for murder in West Germany.
Declaring that the issue was solely a matter for the Federal Government to decide and that it had to make the decision without yielding to pressure from Tel Aviv or anywhere else, the Minister of Justice said last Friday that no one could reproach the West German Government for not doing enough to bring Nazi criminals to trial. The only justifiable reproach was that the Federal Republic was not sufficiently concerned in time with the material from Communist bloc countries which is now turning up, he had claimed.
(The legal commission of the 17-nation Council of Europe voted unanimously in Paris today against the application of any statute of limitations to war crimes. The commission invited member governments to propose a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly stating that a 1948 convention against genocide ruled out such a limitation on the prosecution of war criminals.)
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