The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist: Justice case; Opinion delivered by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal; 1947
Juridical personalities known for partisanship and cruelty: Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville; Roland Freisler; Andrey Vyshinsky… an endless list:
Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville was appointed public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris on 10 March 1793, an office that he filled until 1 August 1794. His zeal in prosecution earned him the nickname Purveyor to the Guillotine. His activity during this time earned him the reputation of one of the most sinister figures of the Revolution. His office as public prosecutor arguably reflected a need to display the appearance of legality during what was essentially political command, more than a need to establish actual guilt. Fouquier de Tinville, like Maximilien Robespierre, was known for his ruthless radicalism. His victims included Charlotte Corday; Marie Antoinette; Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine and his son, Jacques Pierre Brissot; Jean-Marie Roland, Madame Roland; George Danton; Marquis de Condorcet; Camille Desmoulins, Antoine Barnave, Jacques Hébert and his supporters, as well as those of Maximilien Robespierre.
One of the last groups he prosecuted included seven nuns, aged 32–66, of the former convent of Carmelites, living in Paris, plus an eighth nun, of the Convent of the Visitation, “who were charged with consorting together and scheming to trouble the State by provoking civil war with their fanaticism. Instead of living at peace within the bosom of the Republic, which had provided for their subsistence, and instead of obeying the laws, adopted the idea of residing together in this same house…and of making this house a refuge for refractory priests and counter-revolutionary fanatics, with whom they plotted against the Revolution and against the eternal principles of liberty and equality which are its basis.” When the judge read this piece of Fouquier-Tinville’s prose, he condemned them to be deported, as well as all those who had given them refuge.
Fouquier-Tinville‘s career ended with the fall of Robespierre at the start of the Thermidorian Reaction. Although he was briefly kept as the new government’s prosecutor, even helping in the arrest of Robespierre, Louis de Saint-Just, and Georges Couthon, he was arrested after being denounced by Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron. Imprisoned on 1 August, he was brought to trial in front of the Convention. His defense was that he had only obeyed the decrees of the Committee of Public Safety and the Convention..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Quentin_Fouquier-Tinvillehttps://theodora.com/encyclopedia/f/antoine_quentin_fouquiertinville.html
Roland Freisler was a committed Nazi ideologist, and used his legal skills to adapt its theories into practical law-making and judicature. He published a paper entitled “Die rassebiologische Aufgabe bei der Neugestaltung des Jugendstrafrechts (“The racial-biological task involved in the reform of juvenile criminal law”). In this document he argued that “racially foreign, racially degenerate, racially incurable or seriously defective juveniles” should be sent to juvenile centres or correctional education centres and segregated from those who are “German and racially valuable”.
He strongly advocated the creation of laws to punish Rassenschande (“race defilement”, the Nazi term for sexual relations between “Aryans” and “inferior races”), to be classed as “racial treason”. Freisler looked to racist laws in the United States as a model for Nazi legislation targeting Jewish people in Germany. Freisler considered American Jim Crow racist legislation “primitive” for failing to provide a legal definition of the term black or negro person. Nevertheless, while some more conservative Nazi lawyers objected to the lack of precision with which a person could be defined as a “Jew,” he argued that American judges were able to identify black people for purposes of laws in American states that prohibited “miscegenation” between black and white people, and laws that otherwise codified racial segregation, and, therefore, German laws could similarly target Jews even if the term “Jew” could not be given a precise legal definition.
In 1933 he published a pamphlet calling for the legal prohibition of “mixed-blood” sexual intercourse, which met with expressions of public unease in the dying elements of the German free press and non-Nazi political classes and, at the time, lacked public authorization from the policy of the Nazi Party, which had only just obtained dictatorial control of the state. It also led to a clash with his superior Franz Gürtner, but Freisler’s ideological views reflected things to come, as was shown by the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws within two years.
In October 1939, he introduced the concept of ‘precocious juvenile criminal’ in the “Juvenile Felons Decree”. This “provided the legal basis for imposing the death penalty and penitentiary terms on juveniles for the first time in German legal history.” Between 1933 and 1945 the Reich’s Courts sentenced at least 72 German juveniles to death, among them 17-year-old Helmuth Hübener, found guilty of high treason for distributing anti-war leaflets in 1942.
On the outbreak of World War II Freisler issued a legal “Decree against National Parasites” (September 1939) introducing the term perpetrator type, which was used in combination with another Nazi ideological term, parasite. The adoption of racial biological terminology into law portrayed juvenile criminality as ‘parasitical’, implying the need for harsher sentences to remedy it. He justified the new concept with: “in times of war, breaches of loyalty and baseness cannot find any leniency and must be met with the full force of the law.” On 20 January 1942 Freisler, representing the Reich Minister Franz Schlegelberger, attended the Wannsee Conference of senior governmental officials in a villa on the southwestern outskirts of Berlin to provide expert legal advice for the planning of the destruction of European Jewry…. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Freisler
Andrey Vyshinsky (1883-1954): was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat. He is best known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin‘s Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trials. In 1936, Vyshinsky achieved international infamy as the prosecutor at the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial (this trial had nine other defendants), the first of the Moscow Trials during the Great Purge, lashing its defenseless victims with vituperative rhetoric:
Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! … Down with these abject animals! Let’s put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let’s exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let’s push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!
Vyshinsky often punctuated speeches with phrases like “Dogs of the Fascist bourgeoisie”, “mad dogs of Trotskyism”, “dregs of society”, “decayed people”, “terrorist thugs and degenerates”, and “accursed vermin”. This dehumanization aided in what historian Arkady Vaksberg calls “a hitherto unknown type of trial where there was not the slightest need for evidence: what evidence did you need when you were dealing with ‘stinking carrion’ and ‘mad dogs’?”
He is also attributed by some as the author of an infamous quote from the Stalin era: “Give me a man and I will find the crime.” During the trials, Vyshinsky misappropriated the house and money of Leonid Serebryakov (one of the defendants of the infamous Moscow Trials), who was later executed.In April 1937, Vyshinsky denounced Yevgeny Pashukanis, the Soviet Union’s foremost legal scholar and former Deputy People’s Commissar for Justice as a ‘wrecker’. This was the start of a purge of prosecutor’s apparatus, carried out by Vyshinsky, which saw 90 per cent of provincial prosecutors removed, and many of them arrested. Pashukanis was executed later that year.
During the Great Purge, Vyshinsky was approached in his office by Mikhail Ishov, a military procurator based in West Siberia, who had been trying to stop the arrests of innocent people in that territory. Vyshinsky told him: “You have lost your sense of party and class. We don’t intend to pat enemies on the head. … If the enemy doesn’t surrender, he must be destroyed.” After the meeting, he reported Ishov, who was arrested and sentenced to five years in labour camps. Roland Freisler, a German Nazi judge, who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, studied and had attended the trials by Vyshinsky’s in 1938 to use a similar approach in show trials conducted by Nazi Germany.
JUDGEMENT WATCH – JUDGE LOYA CASE: In June 2014, Brijgopal Harkishan Loya was appointed the judge in the special CBI court in Mumbai. He presided over the Sohrabuddin case, in which the president of Bharatiya Janata Party was the prime accused. Justice Loya died on the intervening night between 30 November and 1 December 2014. The media reported that the judge died of a heart attack. Loya’s family remained silent after his death and nothing was reported or heard from them. In November 2016, Loya’s niece, Nupur Balaprasad Biyani, approached the journalist Niranjan Takle. Takle had several meetings between November 2016 and November 2017, with her mother, father, medical doctor who treated Justice Loya on the day of his death. Several disturbing questions emerged about Loya’s death from the meetings; questions about inconsistencies in the reported account of the death; about the procedures followed after the judge died; and about the condition of his body when it was handed over to the family.
The family also described the pressures and inducements Loya faced while presiding over the Sohrabuddin trial. According to Biyani, Loya confided in her that Mohit Shah, The then chief justice of the Bombay High Court offered Loya “a bribe of 100 crore in return for a favorable judgment.” Though Loya’s family asked for an inquiry commission to probe his death, none was ever set up. On 20 November 2017, Niranjan Takle of Caravan Magazine published a detailed report on the disturbing and mysterious circumstances surrounding Loya’s death. Read the Caravan article in the link below:
On 21 November 2017 Niranjan Takle of Caravan Magazine published a detail report on the pressures Loya faced while presiding over the Sohrabuddin trial here. Read the Caravan article in the below link :
https://www.cjar.org/supreme-court-hit-last-nail-judge-loyas-case/
Herlinde Pauer-Studer (2023) Symposium on Justifying Injustice. Legal Theory in Nazi Germany: responses to critics
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After the truth-shower 