SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: It will be put in. I don’t think you have it at the moment.
“The President of the German Reich . . . deeply sensitive of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind; persuaded that the time has come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of international policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated; convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly progress, and that any signatory power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war, should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty; hopeful that, encouraged by their example, all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavor and by adhering to the present treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy . . . .”
Then, Article I:
“The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”
And Article II:
“The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”
In that treaty, that General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, practically the whole civilized world abolished war as a legally permissible means of enforcing the law or of changing it. The right of war was no longer of the essence of sovereignty. Whatever the position may have been at the time of the Hague Convention, whatever the position may have been in 1914, whatever it may have been in 1918—and it is not necessary to discuss it—no international lawyer of repute, no responsible statesman, no soldier concerned with the legal use of armed forces, no economist or industrialist concerned in his country’s war economy could doubt that with the Pact of Paris on the statute book a war of aggression was contrary to international law. Nor have the repeated violations of the Pact by the Axis Powers in any way affected its validity. Let this be firmly and clearly stated. Those very breaches, except perhaps to the cynic and the malevolent, have added to the strength of the treaty; they provoked the sustained wrath of peoples angered by the contemptuous disregard of this great statute and determined to vindicate its provisions. The Pact of Paris is the law of nations. This Tribunal will declare it. The world must enforce it.
Let this also be said, that the Pact of Paris was not a clumsy instrument likely to become a kind of signpost for the guilty. It did not enable Germany to go to war against Poland and yet rely, as against Great Britain and France, on any immunity from warlike action because of the very provisions of the pact. For the pact laid down expressly in its preamble that no state guilty of a violation of its provisions might invoke its benefits. And when, on the outbreak of the second World War, Great Britain and France communicated to the League of Nations that a state of war existed between them and Germany as from the 3rd of September 1939, they declared that by committing an act of aggression against Poland, Germany had violated her obligations assumed not only towards Poland but also towards the other signatories of the pact. A violation of the pact in relation to one signatory was an attack upon all the other signatories and they were entitled to treat it as such. I emphasize that point lest any of these defendants should seize upon the letter of the particulars of Count Two of the Indictment and seek to suggest that it was not Germany who initiated war with the United Kingdom and France on 3 September 1939. The declaration of war came from the United Kingdom and from France; the act of war and its commencement came from Germany in violation of the fundamental enactment to which she was a party.
The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, this great constitutional instrument of an international society awakened to the deadly dangers of another Armageddon, did not remain an isolated effort soon to be forgotten in the turmoil of recurrent international crises. It became, in conjunction with the Covenant of the League of Nations or independently of it, the starting point for a new orientation of governments in matters of peace, war, and neutrality. It is of importance, I think, to quote just one or two of the statements which were being made by governments at that time in relation to the effect of the pact. In 1929 His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom said, in connection with the question of conferring upon the Permanent Court of International Justice jurisdiction with regard to the exercise of belligerent rights in relation to neutral states—and it illustrates the profound change which was being accepted as having taken place as a result of the Pact of Paris in international law:
“But the whole situation . . . . rests, and international law on the subject has been entirely built up, on the assumption that there is nothing illegitimate in the use of war as an instrument of national policy, and, as a necessary corollary, that the position and rights of neutrals are entirely independent of the circumstances of any war which may be in progress. Before the acceptance of the Covenant, the basis of the law of neutrality was that the rights and obligations of neutrals were identical as regards both belligerents, and were entirely independent of the rights and wrongs of the dispute which had led to the war, or the respective position of the belligerents at the bar of world opinion.”