G.l.s in NATO Courts

American colonists in the early 1770s were riled by the King's ordinance allowing British soldiers to be tried in England for civil offenses committed in the colonies. No less irritating to many Englishmen in the early 1950s was the ten-year-old agreement which put U.S. servicemen stationed in Britain outside the jurisdiction of British courts. This irritant was formally removed last week, when the U.S. Senate ratified an addition to the North Atlantic Treaty giving foreign courts the right to try U.S. servicemen for off-duty offenses.

The NATO amendment will standardize the status of U.S. troops in all 13 NATO countries. Of these, Britain was the only one which had an official agreement in force giving members of the U.S. armed forces the right to be tried only by U.S. military courts. In the other NATO countries, the extent of local jurisdiction over U.S. troops varied, regulated by a mass of conflicting local agreements.

The change ran into some hot Senate opposition. Ohio's G.O.P. Senator John W. Bricker called the agreement "a callous disregard" of the rights of U.S. servicemen. Suppose, he warned, an American were tried for a minor violation before a Communist French judge, or a Moslem magistrate who sentenced according to Islamic law.* A tourist or commercial traveler voluntarily submits himself to the law of a country he visits. A conscripted soldier is subjected to a law he may have had neither duty nor opportunity to learn, and no share in making.

Administration leaders argued that passage of the new agreement would quiet European ill-feeling against G.I.s, now immune from civil prosecution in the countries whose laws they may break. President Eisenhower threw his personal support behind the amendment. Wrote Ike: "Failure of the U.S. to ratify . . . could result in undermining the entire U.S. military position in Europe." The next day, after some prodding by Administration forces, the Senators passed the amendment, 72 to 15.

* E.g., strict Islamic law, still occasionally enforced in Saudi Arabia, demands that a thief's hand be cut off.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.