crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
of the courts. At the same time, elections for the National Liberation Councils were held, whose main
duty was to elect judges and jurors. 16 The courts thus became an electoral body of the state authorities.
Up to September 1945, when the courts began working, four laws regulating criminal offences were
passed, the most important being the Act on Criminal Offences Against the People and the State and the Act
on Suppression of Prohibited Trade and Economic Sabotage. The majority of sentences passed between
1945 and 1951 were issued pursuant to these two laws. These laws did not include the fundamental
principles of criminal law of democratic countries, since criminal offences were not precisely defined, which
made it possible to institute the criminal policy which suited the authorities at the moment. 17 According to
generally applicable legal principles, the laws regulating criminal offences would have to be component
parts of the Penal Code, which was adopted only at the beginning of 1951. Therefore in January 1946 the
judges received instructions that in cases where there were no suitable legal regulations, the courts were
to adjudicate from the point of view of attainments of the National Struggle for Liberation; 18 the most
important element was the principle of unified people’s authority. The role of judges in implementing the
penal policy was therefore to protect the system of unified people’s authority, where by the laws gave only
a framework for adjudication. Judges who especially politically but also professionally did not conform
to the new understanding of the role of the courts made numerous errors in adjudicating cases and were
criticised for handing down excessively lenient sentences. The work of the courts was also criticised at
the beginning of December 1945 by Edvard Kardelj, who stated that the courts had to “administer justice
according to the Party’s wishes. The OZNA must be /present/ in the courtroom.” 19 At the end of 1945 the
campaign against the courts led to a cleansing of the ranks of judges, which occurred along political lines.
It was carried out via the Ministry of Justice, and a large number of judges were replaced. The cleansing
of the judges’ ranks caused alarm among the judges, and some judges’ positions were not filled. 20 The
authorities solved the problem by introducing the seating of lay judges in the courts, i.e. judges without
legal education. In this way they hoped to attract “politically solid people” 21 to the courts. This meant that
political criteria became more important than professional qualifications for seating judges, and that the
lay judges were above all good and reliable political activists. Owing to numerous errors they were no
longer elected after the fourth plenary meeting of the YCP in 1951.
The post-war judicial system was also characterised by the powerful role of public prosecutors. The
principle of democratic centralism rose to particular prominence in the organisation and development
of the public prosecutor’s office, which in practice meant that public prosecutors were independent
of the bodies of the authorities. In accordance with the law from 1946 the public prosecutor’s office
was a body of the Yugoslavian People’s Assembly, i.e. a body of the highest legislative authority. 22
Following the Soviet model, where the public prosecutor’s office was directly connected to the Party,
the Yugoslav authorities also established a direct connection between the public prosecutor’s office and
the Party, since most of the employees of the public prosecutor’s offices were Party members. Thus the
public prosecutor’s offices were staffed mainly by political appointees from the very beginning. The
connection between the public prosecutor’s office and the Party was also underscored by the fact that
the republican public prosecutors, who were Party members, participated in meetings of the Politburo
16
Jerca Vodušek Starič, “Background of Judicial Proceedings in Slovenia in the first Post-war Year”, in: Papers on Recent History, 1–2/92,
pp. 141–142 (hereinafter Vodušek Starič, “Background of Judicial Proceedings”); AS 227, Org/1947, file 1/-22, no. 1/47, Report on the
Work of the Ministry of Justice, 22 September 1945; Structure of the National Courts; Org/1947, file 23-33, no. 23/47–II, Topics for
Lectures on the Organization of the Judicial System.
17
OJ DFY, 26/45 and 66/45; Ferjančič, Šturm, Lawlessness, p. 35.
18
AS 227, I/1946, box 8/148, Minutes of Meeting of Presidents of District Courts, President of the Supreme Court and leading functionaries
at the Ministry of Justice, 21 January 1946 and Org/1947, file 54–87, Minutes of the Second Conference of Presidents of District Courts,
6 April 1946.
19
Aleš Gabrič, “Prosecution of Political Opponents”, in: Recent Slovenian History 2, p. 861(hereinafter Gabrič, “Prosecution of Political
Opponents”); Lovro Šturm, Background of the Slovenian Justice System, Ljubljana 1995 (hereinafter Šturm, Background of the Slovenian
Justice System I); Survey of the Work of the Ministry of Justice in 1947. AS 227, Organization/1947, file 54-87, Minutes of the Second
Conference of Presidents of District Courts, 6 April 1946.
20
AS 227, Org/1945, file 1401–1700, Report on the Work of the Ministry of Justice, 9 January 1946; I/1945, box 7/132, Minutes of the First
Conference of Representatives of the Republics’ Ministries of Justice 11 and 12 February 1946; AS 353, file 8, Monthly Report 1945,
Report of the Penal Department, 15 January 1946.
21
AS 227, I/1946, box 8/148, Minutes of Meeting of Presidents of District Courts, President of the Supreme Court and leading functionaries
at the Ministry of Justice, 21 January 1946 and Org/1946, file 1401–1700, Report on the Work of the Ministry of Justice, 9 February
1946.
22
Official Journal of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (OJ FPRY), 60/46.
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