An international legal conference, made up of 43 eminent lawyers from 20 countries, has concluded that a new wave of officially-sponsored anti-Semitism is “rampant” in the Soviet Union. The two-day meeting here also concluded that the Soviet authorities were breaking their own laws in harassing persons who have applied for emigration visas, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen said today.
Cohen said old anti-Semitic theories were being resurrected in official and semi-official publications as part of the new anti-Jewish campaign. He said the Soviet Union’s official anti-Zionist position was another term for anti-Semitism.
Sponsors of the conference stressed that the majority of the participants were not Jewish and that the two-day session was the first time that the position of Soviet Jews was treated from the legal standpoint rather than just the humanitarian.
Among the participants were Arthur Goldberg a former United States Supreme Court Justice and Ambassador to the United Nations, and Gaston Monnerville, a former president of the French Senate. The conference statement will be sent to Chief Soviet Prosecutor Roman Rudenko along with a proposal that Soviet and Western lawyers should cooperate to protect human rights in the USSR.
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