Twenty-seven international law experts attending a Congress on International Penal Law here heard a proposal today that the Congress call on the United Nations to seek to divorce crimes against humanity from war crimes, so that such crimes would be punishable no matter when committed.
The proposal was offered by Dr. S.J. Roth, director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London. The Congress was convened by five resistance movements to discuss international codification of crimes against humanity, crimes in peace and war crimes, as well as the problem of creation of an international penal code. Such crimes were incorporated in the charter and judgments of the Allied War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg and reaffirmed by the U.N. General Assembly. A draft code was prepared by the U.N. international law commission.
Dr. Roth made his proposal in urging the Congress to call on the U.N. to resume preparation of such an international penal code. He also urged that such a code include provisions excluding such crimes from any statutes of limitation or from classification as political crimes. Several fugitive Nazi war criminals have escaped extradition when the host country termed their crimes as political.
Gideon Hauser, former Israeli Attorney General and chief prosecutor at the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, cited cases of such criminals in which extradition had been denied partly because of domestic statutes of limitation. He cited the case of Franz Stangl, wartime commandant of the Nazi death camps at Treblinka and Sobibor, who was arrested in March in Sao Paulo, and whose extradition is still under consideration by the Brazilian Supreme Court. Austria, West Germany and Poland have asked Stangl’s extradition.
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