Justice by Publicity

RULE OF LAW

Albania gets a black mark for staging show trials of political opponents in the worst Stalinist tradition. Cameroun is condemned for banning opposition parties. Portugal is reprimanded for censoring its press. U.S. segregationists are denounced for flouting the U.S. Constitution. With Olympian impartiality, the quarterly Bulletin of the International Commission of Jurists attacks violations of human rights wherever it finds them.

The outspoken association of 40,000 judges, lawyers and law professors from more than 60 non-Communist countries does not really expect to reform the world. But it is convinced that publicizing any infraction of the rule of law serves an immediate and practical purpose. The presence and protest of a commission jurist at the 1960 "trial" of deposed Democrats in Turkey transformed that mob-ringed Roman circus overnight into an orderly judicial proceeding. And the glare of the commission's carefully documented study, Spain and the Rule of Law, eventually persuaded once furious Spanish officials to discuss incommunicado detentions and denial of the right to strike.

Stimulating Invective. The International Commission of Jurists was founded in 1952 when a group of lawyers met in West Berlin to probe East German violations of "the rule of law." With remarkable consensus, jurists from quite different countries agreed that the phrase means certain bedrock basics of justice, such as freedom of speech, press, worship, assembly and equal protection of the laws. Warning that "the state exists to serve man," the commission has needled authoritarian governments ever since.

The commission has been assailed as a "FreeMasonic" vehicle for a "Moscow-directed campaign" by Franco's government, as a passel of "lunatics" by Peking Radio. But the invective merely convinces Secretary-General Sean MacBride that he occupies a challenging job. "Invariably our views displease the governments who practice injustice or seek to weaken the rule of law," says MacBride, 60, a former Irish revolutionary whose own love of justice blossomed in many a British jail.

MacBride's father led the Irish brigade that fought against the British in the Boer War, was later executed by the British for his part in Ireland's famous Easter Rising of 1916. MacBride's mother was the legendary Maud Gonne, heroine of Ireland's revolt and of Poet W. B. Yeats, who called her "a phoenix in my youth." MacBride spent his own youth bombing British armored cars, commanded the outlaw Irish Republican Army while studying and practicing law in the 1930s. A top Dublin barrister, he later became Ireland's Minister of External Affairs.

Civilizing Law. Despite their bluster, says MacBride, most governments criticized by the commission are willing to discuss its complaints or to admit its investigating teams to probe alleged injustice. Sometimes, as in the case of last year's Panama riots, the commission does not even have to file a complaint. It is invited to make an impartial assessment, and it does. Called in by Panama, a three-man team, consisting of a Dutch law professor, a Swedish judge and a leading Indian lawyer, stunned its host by finding in favor of the U.S. (TIME, June 19).

The commission is partly financed by the Ford Foundation, but largely out of the pockets of its own members, such as the chief justices of countries as diverse as Nigeria and Norway. At commission headquarters at 2 Rue du Cheval-Blanc in suburban Geneva, a staff of 35 hustles to publish not only the Bulletin but also the Journal and the Newsletter, with a combined circulation of 400,000 copies in four languages (English, French, German, Spanish). Paid only bare expenses, teams of jurists are dispatched in every direction; international congresses are organized in such places as Athens, New Delhi and Lagos. Next month: Bangkok.

It is the commission's basic premise that human freedom is equally precious everywhere, yet is nowhere completely safe. The essence of freedom is law, say the multinational lawyers, and like the organization's founders, Secretary-General MacBride holds a lofty view of the lawyer's obligation. "Lawyers," says he, "have a sacred duty to preserve the physical, moral and intellectual integrity of human beings."

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