[Signature] François de Menthon

For the Government of the United Kingdom of

Great Britain and Northern Ireland:

[Signature] Hartley Shawcross

For the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:

[Signature] R. Rudenko”

Obviously it was no printing error which simply would have been corrected. This is rather a carefully thought out limitation on the part of the Signatory Powers which was clarified unmistakably. Without this limitation, a precedent of decisive significance would have been created for international law for the possibility would have existed to prosecute at any time alleged crimes against humanity in a different country. According to this, the socialist states would have assailed the social conditions in capitalistic countries as crimes against humanity, and vice versa the capitalistic states could have replied to the measures of the socialist countries with an intervention as experienced by the young Bolshevist Revolution in 1919. Precisely that however was to be prevented by not recognizing an independent crime against humanity for the protection of sovereign states. Professor Donnedieu de Vabres has particularly mentioned this point of view in his lecture as a decisive point of view of the International Military Tribunal.

The same restrictive view of this question is taken in the latest International Law of the United Nations Organization (UNO), Chapter I, Article 2, paragraph 7 of the resolution of San Francisco, concerning the establishment of UNO, dated 26 June 1945, reads that an interference in matters which are within the jurisdiction of the country is inadmissible. Accordingly it is a fixed principle of international law even today that proceedings within a state cannot entail sanction; spoken in the words of the statute, there are no independent crimes against humanity, which might be punished as international crimes.

The opinion of Hugo Grotius and his numerous adherents is rejected and is no longer valid as international law today. Interventions from points of view of humanity are declined, as their motive seems suspicious to the states.[[133]]

Decisive alone is the practice of the members of the body of the nations who have agreed on international law (Voelkerrechtsgemeinschaft) and the existing agreements on international law.