Law and Legal Practice
The commission outlines a number of instances where established law as interpreted by the courts was ignored by the Federal government ruling by decree under the emergency powers granted to it by Federal parliament in 1939. One of the most important aspects was the abandonement of constitutional principal of equality before the law which had far reaching impact on the treatment of foreigners, minority citizens and contributed to the failure of the state to offer any diplomatic protection to Swiss Jews residing in Nazi occupied territory. They conclude, "...diplomatic practice increasingly came into line with the ethnic «völkisch» criteria adopted by the Nazi state, an approach which sharply conflicted with the constitutional equality enjoyed by Jews in Switzerland since 1874."
With respect to refugees, under existing Swiss domestic law, only refugees whose life was at risk because of political activities could be granted asylum. This meant those who were fleeing because of racial persecution could be returned to the persecuting government. However, in July 1936, Switzerland ratified a provisional arrangement concerning the status of refugees coming from Germany: "Switzerland violated this agreement by handing refugees27 from Germany, whose lives were at risk and who had crossed the border (legally or illegally) and were not apprehended immediately in the border’s vicinity, over to the German authorities on the borders with Austria or France."
The commission identified a number of areas, particularly in the domain of private international law, where the courts applied the doctrine of "ordre public" which is an explicit ethical component of law: for example, Swiss courts "consistently took the view that Nazi anti-Semitic legislation must be deemed to constitute injustice which violated all legal principles and should therefore not be applied in practice." However, this doctrine based on what was right and proper under Swiss law was not extended to practices which were incompatible with more universal, non-codified principles such as the principle of humanity.
Read more about this topic: Bergier Commission
Famous quotes containing the words law, legal and/or practice:
“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)