A team of prominent American attorneys and law professors, headed by Telford Taylor, a law professor at Columbia University Law School, has been trying to obtain the release of Jewish and other prisoners in the Soviet Union through the use of Russian judicial procedures and laws, but the Soviet authorities were found “unresponsive to their own laws.”
The secret efforts of the American team during the last year were disclosed here today at a press conference in the New York Bar Association building. Taylor, who was chief U.S. prosecutor at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, said that after months without any response on the part of the Soviets to charges by the American attorneys the team is discarding secrecy and taking the case to the “court of world opinion.”
According to Taylor, the group aimed at proving to the Soviets that “the validity of the legal procedure” and Soviet criminal laws were violated when the Jewish prisoners were tried, and that the conditions in which those prisoners are held are also illegal according to Soviet law
The team is representing the relatives of 18 Jewish and two non-Jewish “Prisoners of Conscience.” The two non-Jews were defendants in the first Leningrad trial in Dec. 1970, which involved Soviet Jews who allegedly planned to escape to Israel. Taylor disclosed that the team obtained a power of attorney to work on behalf of the prisoners from their relatives who immigrated to Israel. After interviews with the prisoners’ relatives and a thorough study of each case, the team submitted a petition on behalf of each individual prisoner to Roman Rudenko, the Procurator General of the USSR.
VIOLATIONS OF SOVIET LAW CITED
“While we were gratified at the willingness of Rudenko to receive our material, we are dismayed at the lack of reaction,” Taylor said, adding; “We started legal procedures in the Soviet Union with the firm intention to operate privately and with no publicity….We now feel the necessity to bring the plight of these 20 prisoners before the court of world opinion.”
Taylor met Rudenko last July in Moscow. The two attorneys met first at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and had not seen each other since. According to one of the documents submitted to Rudenko, violations of the Soviet laws in the trials of the Jewish prisoners included denial of free choice of defense counsel, refusal of permission to call witnesses in behalf of the defensed “invocation of criminal statutes clearly inapplicable to the conduct charged against the defendants.”
Taylor said at today’s press conference that there are some 40 “Prisoners of Conscience” in the Soviet Union. He also charged that the Jewish prisoners are placed in jails with Russian war criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and are subject to anti-Semitic abuse. Taylor said “We hope our efforts will result in a measure of relief” for the prisoners. He pointed out that his group represents “the relatives, not the prisoners,” because the team members had access only to the relatives. Taylor said, in reply to a question, that the State Department was informed about the team’s efforts from the beginning.
The legal team which assisted Taylor in the investigation, preparation and prosecution of the cases included Leon Lipson, professor at Yale University Law School; George Fletcher, professor at University of California at Los Angeles Law School; Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard University Law School; and Jeanne Baker, attorney of Boston. Other lawyers supporting the effort included Eugene Gold, Kings County District Attorney and Nicholas Scopetta, New York City Investigations Commissioner.
Taylor stated that he had been approached by the families of other Soviet Jewish prisoners and will represent them as part of the continuing project. Taylor and members of the American legal team are serving without fee, Out-of-pocket and travel expenses have been contributed by members of the group and other Americans.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
