crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
The first trials before the Court of National Honour were begun on 4 July, and the senates handed
down sentences until the end of August 1945, when the court was abolished. 12 During this time around
2,000 proceedings were heard, at which large groups of defendants were usually tried, so the precise
number of persons convicted is not known. As in the trials held before the military tribunals, the
OZNA played a significant role in the proceedings held before the Court of National Honour, and the
proceedings were short. The court tried enemy collaborators and sympathisers, and people who had
cooperated with them economically, politically, culturally and in any other way during the war. The
Court sentenced all convicts to the dispossession of their citizen’s and political rights; this meant that
among other things the court deprived them of their right to vote and the right to perform civil service
duties and occupations. In addition, it could also sentence them to forced labour and the seizure of
property, the latter in 411 cases. 13
In the proceedings held before military tribunals and the Court of National Honour, the requirements
of a country under the rule of law were not taken into consideration. The entire procedure was a short
one and the OZNA gathered only incriminating evidence. Thus the defendants did not have access to legal
defence, and an indictment was as good as a sentence. The operations of these courts were also important
for the authorities due to the sentences imposed, particularly the revoking of the right to vote from potential
opponents of the new system and the seizure of property. This had long-term consequences, since the sentence
of loss of citizen’s and political rights also constituted a loss of voting rights. The convicts were removed
from the voting registers, and thus were unable to participate in the elections of local authorities in August
1945 and in the November elections for the constitutional convention. When amnesty was declared at the end
of August 1945, the sentences of property seizure and loss of political rights for the most part remained valid
in their entirety. The revoking of voting rights through the decisions of the military tribunals and the Court
of National Honour made it easier to cleanse the voting registers before the elections for the constitutional
convention, and the seizure of property made the work of nationalisation easier. 14
3. Organisation of regular courts
The foundations for the establishment of the judicial system after the end of the war had already
been set during the war. A Soviet lawyer, politician and chief prosecutor at the Stalinist trials in the
Soviet Union between 1938 and 1938 described its role as follows: “They have their own particular
field and a special operating method, but in terms of their role, duties and objectives they do not differ
in any way from other state authorities. /…/ A court is not a body that is non-political and independent
of social events, but on the contrary is a body that is closely connected with the masses and with state
policy in general. The courts are weapons in the fight against exploitation and the exploiters.” 15 After
the war, this conception of the role of the courts was put into effect in Yugoslavia as well. The courts
became merely a part of the unified and indivisible people’s authority, which the Communist Party
wanted to protect as much as possible as a basic attainment of the National War of Liberation. Therefore
it viewed the courts as political and as bodies independent of any particular social event. Law and
the legal system were in the hands of the politicians, and the courts adjudicated according to political
directives.
In addition to the principle of unified authority, the creation and organisation of the courts after
the end of the war were also influenced by the ideas of the discontinuity of the new legal order with the
legal order of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and of the possibility of electing judges and jurors. Yugoslav
Communist Party ideologue Edvard Kardelj stated as early as October 1944 that it was unacceptable
for the courts to rely on the old laws and the legal order of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Therefore in
August 1945 a law was passed which introduced new regulation of the organisation and competences
12
OJ SNLC and NGS, 29/1945.
13
Mikola, Confiscation of Property, pp. 146–148.
14
Aleš Gabrič, “Liberation and the Establishment of the New Authorities”, in: Recent Slovenian History 2, p. 836.
15
AS 227, State Secretariat for Judicial Administration of the People’s Republic of Slovenia (AS 227), I/1947, box 17/236, Application of
Judicial Laws and Duties and Application of our Legitimacy.
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