Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 1950. SPY TRIALS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 116, 1 March 1950, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 1950. SPY TRIALS

The series of spy trials in Com-munist-dominated countries, and more particularly that in Budapest last week, draws attention to the system of justice which prevails wherever Communism exists. At all those trials the accused have had to face charges of espionage, treason, sabotage or similar crimes and from the outset their fate has been sealed. In some cases they have been defended by counsel, but this has merely been to save face so far as the prosecution has been concerned. In no single instance 1 could it be said that the accused bad had a fair trial, as fair trial is understood in the democracies. One of the most significant features of these trials has been that most of the principal accused have confessed to the main charges, and some have paid the penalty with their lives. There have been too many of these confessions, and that fact has caused the Western Powers, when their nationals have been involved, to protest on the ground that the confessions were forced. When a British business man, Edgar Sanders, and an American citizen, Robert Vogeler, pleaded guilty in the Budapest Criminal Court lasi week to spying and sabotage against the “people’s democracy” of Hungary, and supplemented their pleas with singularly abject “confessions,” British and American people all over the world were shocked into horror that such a procedure should be possible at this period of the 20th century. The sentences that followed —imprisonment for 13 years for Sanders and 15 for Vogeler—.have added to the wave of indignation. Both the British, and the American Governments have protested to Hungary, against the nature of the so-called “trials” and the “confessions.” .There can be litfle doubt, in spite of strong denials by Hungary, that pressure was brought to bear on the accused, but there does not appear to be much that can be done in the matter. What ,are the methods pursued. what is this technique? Some suggestions are offered in an article by Edmond Demaitre, in the “United Nations World.” Of those who “confessed” few have survived and none has ever escaped or been released to tell the tale. But whatever the methods, they are the most inhuman in the age-long tragedy of “man’s inhumanity to man.” The Romans used to examine slaves under torture, and the rack was used in the Middle Ages to extort confessions or evidence to secure conviction, but it has been left to the Gestapo, the Ogpu, and their successors in totalitarian States to raise the refinements of torture to the last degree. All this is far worse -than a travesty of justice; there is no vestige of justice in. it at all.