The general issues under this Charter are to be determined with finality in one trial before the International Tribunal, and in that trial every accused organization must be defended by counsel and must be represented by at least one leading member, and other individuals may apply to be heard. Their applications may be granted if the Tribunal thinks justice requires it. The only issue in this trial concerns the collective criminality of the organization or group. It is to be adjudicated by what amounts to a declaratory judgment. It does not decree any punishment either against the organization or against individual members.
The only specification as to the effect of this Tribunal’s declaration that an organization is criminal is contained in Article 10, which, if you will bear with me, I will read:
“In cases where a group or organization is declared criminal by the Tribunal, the competent national authority of any Signatory shall have the right to bring individuals to trial for membership therein before national, military, or occupation courts.
“In any such case the criminal nature of the group or organization is considered proved and shall not be questioned.”
Unquestionably, it would have been competent for the Charter to have declared flatly that membership in any of these named organizations is criminal and should be punished accordingly. If there had been such an enactment, it would not have been open to an individual, who was being tried for membership, to contend that the organization was not in fact, criminal. But the framers of the Charter, acting last summer at a time before the evidence which has been adduced here was even available to us, did not care to find organizations criminal by fiat. They left that issue to determination after relevant facts were developed by adversary proceedings. Plainly, the individual is better off because of the procedure of the Charter, which leaves that finding of criminality to this body after hearings at which the organization must, and the individual may, be represented. It is at least the best assurance that we could devise, that no mistake would be made in dealing with these organizations.
Under the Charter, the groups and organizations named in the Indictment are not on trial in the conventional sense of that term. They are more nearly under investigation as they might be before a grand jury in Anglo-American practice. Article 9 recognizes a distinction between the declaration of a group or organization as criminal and “the trial of any individual member thereof.” The power of the Tribunal to try is confined to “persons,” and the Charter does not expand that term by definition, as statutes sometimes do, to include other than natural persons. The groups or organizations named in the Indictment were not as entities served with process. The Tribunal is not empowered to impose any sentence upon them as entities. For example, it may not levy a fine upon them even though they have property of the organization, nor convict any person because of membership.
It is also to be observed that the Charter does not require subsequent proceedings against anyone. It provides only that the competent national authorities shall have the right to bring individuals to trial for membership therein.
The Charter is silent as to the form that these subsequent trials should take. It was not deemed wise, on the information then available, that the Charter should regulate subsequent proceedings. Nor was it necessary to do so. There is a continuing legislative authority, representing all four signatory nations, competent to take over where the Charter leaves off. Legislative supplementation of the Charter, of course, would be necessary in any event to confer jurisdiction on local courts, to define their procedures, and to prescribe different penalties for different forms of activity.
Fear has been expressed, however, that the Charter’s silence as to future proceedings means that great numbers of members will be rounded up and automatically punished as a result of a declaration that an organization is criminal. It also has been suggested that this is, or may be, the consequence of Article II, 1(d) of Control Council Act Number 10, which defines as a crime “membership in categories of a criminal group or organization declared criminal by the International Military Tribunal.” A purpose to inflict punishment without a right of hearing cannot be spelled out of this Charter and would be offensive to both its letter and its spirit. And I do not find in Control Council Act Number 10 any inconsistency with the Charter. Of course, to reach all individual members would require numerous hearings, but they will involve only narrow issues. Many persons will have no answers to charges if they are carefully prepared; and the proceedings should be expeditious, nontechnical, and held in the locality where the person accused resides, and, incidentally, may be conducted in two languages at most.
And I think it is clear that before any person is punishable for membership in a criminal organization, he is entitled to a hearing on the facts of his case. The Charter does not authorize the national authorities to punish membership without hearing—it gives them only the right to “bring individuals to trial.” That means what it says. A trial means there is something to try.