An Army of Principles

In a spacious marble building in New Delhi last week, earnest men from 53 nations quietly undertook a task of more potential importance to 20th century man than the cracking of the atom or the exploration of space. Their goal: to foster the rule of law throughout the world by denning the minimum legal safeguards that all men everywhere could reasonably demand of their governments.

The men who met in New Delhi were members of a unique organization--the International Commission of Jurists. Born in 1952 out of revulsion at the drumhead trials then going on in Communist East Germany, and supported by 20,000 lawyers throughout the world, the jurists' commission is tied to no national government, is so thoroughly self-financed that the delegates to last week's congress had to dig into their own pockets to get up the air fare to New Delhi. Thanks to its freedom from official pressures, the commission does not have to worry about diplomatic niceties. No lawyers from Spain, Portugal, South Africa or the Soviet bloc were invited to New Delhi, on the ground that the rule of law is not in operation in their countries.

Reality's Representative. The jurists' commission does not try to make international law. It concentrates on specific violations of civil liberties. It sent observers to the political trial of Yugoslavia's Milovan Djilas and to South Africa's mass treason trial, and believes that their presence may have helped to shame the prosecution into redrafting the flimsy indictments of the 91 defendants in the South African trial. To New Delhi Britain sent a high-powered delegation that hoped, in after-hours talk, to impress on lawyers who had come from newly independent Commonwealth countries the need for strict constitutional limitations on the powers of such ambitious rulers as Ghana's Premier Kwame Nkrumah.

Real focus of the commission's interest, however, was its ambitious attempt to come up with a universally acceptable set of "principles, institutions and procedures . . . to protect the individual from arbitrary government and to enable him to enjoy the dignity of man." Right at the start, the jurists' qualifications for this job were challenged by India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a onetime barrister-at-law of London's Inner Temple. India is bothered by the setting up of military dictatorships all over Southeast Asia; it is itself a democracy, but does not scruple on occasion to hold political prisoners without trial. Said Nehru: "It may be that in a changing society, [the executive] represents reality more than the statute law which the judge administers."

How little Nehru's classic rationalization for arbitrary government impressed the free world's lawyers was made clear in the final resolution of the New Delhi congress. Among its recommendations:

P: Any legislative powers granted to the executive branch of a national government "should be within the narrowest possible limits."

P: "Limitations on legislative power should be incorporated in a written constitution and the safeguards therein should be protected by an independent judicial tribunal."

P: An accused person must be assumed innocent until proved guilty.

P: Judges should be chosen in such a way and assured of long-enough tenure of office that they can act independently.

The Common Decencies. As realistic men, the jurists had no illusions that these vital safeguards to liberty would sweep the earth overnight. "Our business here," said India's ex-Supreme Court Judge Vivian Bose, "is to see whether we as lawyers, judges and jurists cannot stir the conscience of the world into insisting that there shall be certain common decencies for all men in all lands." To some it might seem improbable that the conscience of the world would ever greatly affect the actions of totalitarian rulers. But the men who met in New Delhi last week had behind them the experience of one of history's most successful propagandists. Wrote Tom Paine 175 years ago: "An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot."

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