State Court (Czechoslovakia)

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Státní soud , German state court , is a special feature of the Czechoslovakian jurisdiction. In the history of Czechoslovakia there were two dishes that were called státní soud . The first was established in 1923 (with Law 50/1923) in the interwar period, the second (with Law 232/1948) after the Communist seizure of power in October 1948. Both had the task of defending the republic against particularly dangerous acts, in accordance with the Law for the Defense of the Republic (1923) and the Law for the Defense of the People's Democratic Republic (1948). The State Court of 1948 played a decisive role in the political show trials of 1948–1954 and was thus also one of the most important instruments of repression of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (abbreviated KPTsch or KSČ) in the introduction and consolidation of communist autocracy after 1948; however, not all political show trials of the time were tried before the state court.

Státní soud from 1923

Palace of Justice in Brno, seat of the State Court from 1923

Discussions about a law for the protection of the republic had been held earlier, but only after the assassination attempt on the then finance minister Alois Rašín did they lead to a concrete result: the law 50/1923 for the protection of the republic was adopted in March 1923, which also included the Státní soud, the State Court, was envisaged and established by Law 51/1923, which was passed at the same time. Its seat was in the Palace of Justice in Brno .

The offenses that the court was supposed to deal with included: attacks on the republic and its preparation, threats to the security of the republic, military betrayal, insulting the president and disturbing the general peace. The assassin, the young anarcho-communist Josef Šoupal, also became the first case to be heard in the new court. The other known case before the State Court was the so-called Židenice coup ( Židenický puč ). It was an attempt by the small Czech fascist party Národní obec fašistická to take power in Czechoslovakia. The armed attack on a barracks happened in January 1933 in Židenice (around the time Hitler came to power in Germany) and was repulsed. The State Court gave relatively mild sentences, which were later increased by the Supreme Court.

Due to the confusing location of the archives, the quantitative activity of the court is difficult to estimate: there is no complete archived documentation or the archives have not yet been processed and evaluated and are therefore not accessible. The lawyer and historian Jan Kazda estimates very cautiously that the state court probably tried five to ten cases (the number of those convicted by all the courts involved under the Law for the Protection of the Republic is then 3,143, which is only a small proportion of all crimes, namely 350,000 , referred to as). However, it must also be taken into account that the assessment of the jurisdiction of the courts was not yet developed, so that there were probably several hundred cases that met the criteria of the law for the protection of the republic, but not by the state court, but by others Courts were taken.

The State Court existed in this form until 1934. Law 68/1935 of April 4, 1935 modified the State Court Act insofar as the tasks of this court were delegated to the Supreme Court ( Nejvyšší soud ). The judges' term of office came to an end at the end of 1934 and the court de facto ceased to exist before the amendment law was passed.

Státní soud from 1948

Prague Palace of Justice, seat of the State Court from 1948

After the end of the war, the system of courts in Czechoslovakia underwent some changes. The first step was the establishment of the so-called. Retribution courts, including the extraordinary people's courts ( mimořádný lidový soud ) and the national court ( národní soud ), both in 1945. They dealt with offenses that occurred during the Protectorate: collaboration with the occupying power, denouncing and the like.

In a second step, after the February coup on October 6, 1948, the so-called State Court ( státní soud ) was established (by Law 232/1948), with which the actual phase of the political show trials began. The basis was the law for the protection of the People's Democratic Republic ( Zákon na ochranu lidově democické republiky ) of October 6, 1948, whose name differed only slightly from the corresponding law of 1923, but the function of the court was then essential: it was often called " typical revolutionary court in the period of the greatest terror ”or similar. The most common offenses constructed in the show trials included high treason (section 1 of the Act) and espionage (section 5); sentences of at least 10 to 20 years in prison, life imprisonment or the death penalty were provided.

During the drafting of the two laws, the Soviet experience, corresponding laws and legal literature were constantly referred to, some of which were translated in the Czechoslovakian laws. Unlike in other areas, however, Soviet advisers have no direct influence on the creation of the new criminal laws.

The State Court, which had its seat in Prague and other departments in Brno and Bratislava, was assigned corresponding public prosecutor's offices, which were also located in these three cities. However, numerous trials were held at the scene of the incident.

Similar to the 1923 State Court, complete details of the 1948 State Court are not yet available; Above all, the jurisdiction of the courts for the crimes named in the Law for the Protection of the People's Democratic Republic was not clearly clarified. Criminal proceedings under the Law for the Protection of the People's Democratic Republic were usually brought before the state court if the law provided for a death penalty or a prison sentence of more than ten years, or if a public prosecutor suggested that they be consulted before the state court. However, it also said there "The prosecutor does not have to justify his proposal to justify the jurisdiction of the state court to decide a case". Apart from that, there were gaps in the reporting in the Czechoslovak press, which did not cover all political processes.

The state court (as well as the public prosecutor's offices assigned to it) only worked until the end of 1952. On January 1, 1953, Law 66/1952 came into force, with which the competences of the courts were reorganized: the tasks of the previous state court were assigned to courts at a lower level . There is an opinion among experts that the idea that the abolition of the State Court on December 31, 1952 would alleviate the oppression and persecution in Czechoslovakia is fundamentally wrong. By transferring the activities of the State Court to the regional or other courts, only the organizational form was changed, but not the content.

Státní soud in numbers

Apart from the figures below on the Státní soud of 1948, a comparison with the work of the State Court in 1923 is instructive.

In the democratic system of the pre-war Czechoslovak republic (1918–1938), according to the authority ÚDV (Authority for Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism), only 20 people were executed; four death sentences were carried out for so-called political offenses, three of them at the time of the increasing threat to the republic from fascist Germany (these death sentences were imposed for military treason). According to the ÚDV, on the other hand, most executions in Czechoslovakia were carried out between 1949 and 1953 - around 250, of which more than 80 percent were for so-called “political offenses”.

Some information, such as the number of processes and the like, is only partially reliable for various reasons. In the specialist literature, it is pointed out several times that, depending on the need, some criminal offenses were defined as anti-state activity, i.e. political offenses (and thus often fell within the jurisdiction of the state court) and vice versa, political offenses were classified as criminal and occurred other dishes. The historian Petr Mallota from the ÚSTR institute gives another reason for the different numbers: it depends on whether the numbers also include executed KPTsch party members, which is not always the case, and whether, for example, members of the Hlinka Guard are included or not. The historian Tomek notes that due to the ongoing evaluation, all the figures in the archive material regarding the political show trials of that time may still change.

  • Personnel strength
Complete figures are available for 1951. According to this, there were a total of 53 judges in the Prague, Brno and Bratislava departments (presidents of the Senate, judges, others), most of them in Prague, as well as 46 public prosecutors working or assigned in this area, most of them also in Prague. In the same year, they were to be increased by 24 and 29 people respectively, and a further 43 judges and 30 public prosecutors at the Supreme Court and the General Procuratorate could be recalled.
  • Arrested, accused, convicted
In 1950 there were 11,026 political prisoners in Czechoslovakia; in 1951/52 there were 16,000 more. According to some information, there were trials in the period 1951/1952 in which about 100,000 people were investigated for anti-state activity. In the period from 1948 to 1954, a total of 40,000 to 45,000 citizens were found guilty under the law for the protection of the republic before various courts, the largest number of those accused before the state court (6,649 people) or convicted (5,346 people) was reached in 1950.
  • Státní soud and the death penalty
About 250 people were executed in Czechoslovakia during communist rule, over 80 percent of them for political reasons (the last such execution took place in 1960); During the presidency of Klement Gottwald alone (June 14, 1948 - March 14, 1953) 234 people were executed, 189 of them for political reasons. The following figures are available for the death sentences pronounced by the State Court: 1949: 57, 1950: 59, 1951: 57, most of them then 1952: 73, a total of 246, alternatively, Marejka mentions (including the year 1948, i.e. during the official activity of the State Court) 233 pronounced death sentences, of which 178 were carried out.
  • Pardons
Compared to the period of pre-war Czechoslovakia, in which President Masaryk granted a total of 433 pardons for pronounced death sentences, President Gottwald pardoned only 17 people, his successor Antonín Zápotocký then only two.

Competence and education of judges and public prosecutors (1948)

With Act 319/1948 of December 22, 1948 on the so-called “People's Democratization of the Judicial System”, laypeople without appropriate education were also considered as judges. These people's judges ("soudce z lidu") were then usually outnumbered than the actual judges, but their vote counted just like that of the professional judges.

However, because the employees in the judiciary still came from the old system and were mostly considered to be unreliable, there was a strong need for new lawyers (judges, public prosecutors), and in the shortest possible time. Their use in the judiciary should bridge the time until new lawyers, who should be trained at the universities according to the new rules, are ready for action. For this reason so-called “legal schools of the working people” ( právnické školy pracujících , PŠP) were founded. They retrained laypeople in courses lasting only a few months, while the regular course lasted five years. The lawyers who were retrained in this way and assigned to the public prosecutor's offices called themselves "workers' prosecutors" ( dělničtí prokurátoři ), which had an ideological background and is misleading because the retraining involved people from all walks of life: workers, Farmers, (politically reliable) self-employed, civil servants, traders. They were employed in the most important and highest positions in the judicial system (courts, public prosecutor's offices), although de facto they had no legal training or legal practice.

Jurist and historian Jaroslav Vorel therefore believes that it is not only the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia that has primary responsibility for the results of the show trials and class justice in the period in question and afterwards, but also the judiciary itself.

Competent Laws

  • Law 50/1923: Law for the Protection of the Republic ( Zákon na ochranu republiky ) of March 19, 1923
  • Law 51/1923: Law on the State Court ( Zákon o státním soudě ) of March 19, 1923
  • Law 68/1935: Law on the Higher Regional Courts in the Role of the State Courts ( Zákon o vrchních soudech jako soudech státních ) of April 4, 1935
  • Law 231/1948: Law on the Protection of the People's Democratic Republic ( Zákon na ochranu lidově democické republiky ) of October 6, 1948
  • Law 232/1948: Law on the State Court ( Zákon o státním soudu ) of October 6, 1948
  • Law 319/1948: Law on the People's Democratization of the Judicial System ( Zákon o zlidovění soudnictví ) of December 22, 1948
  • Law 66/1952: Law on the Organization of Courts ( Zákon o organisaci soudů ) of October 30, 1952

Individual evidence

The documents listed below refer to the following sources, among others:

  • Karel Kaplan: The political processes in Czechoslovakia 1948–1953 , publications of the Collegium Carolinum, Volume 48, edited by the board of the Collegium Carolinum, Research Center for Bohemian Countries, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-486-51081-9
  • Jan Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ochrany republiky 1923–1939 [Selected aspects of the defense of the republic 1923–1939], Masaryk University, Brno 2014/2015, online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  • Jaroslav Vorel, Alena Šimánková et al .: Československá justice v letech 1948–1953 v dokumentech [The Czechoslovak Justice 1948–1953 in documents], Part I., Sešity No. 8, series of publications by the ÚVD (Authority for Documentation and Investigation of Crimes of Communism), Prague 2003, ISBN 80-86621-03-0 , online at: policie.cz / ...
  • Jaroslav Vorel, Alena Šimánková, Lukáš Babka: Československá justice v letech 1948–1953 v dokumentech [The Czechoslovak Justice 1948–1953 in documents], Part II., Sešity No. 9, series of publications by the ÚVD (Authority for Documentation and Investigation of Crimes of Communism), Prague 2004, ISBN 80-86621-05-7 , online at: policie.cz / ...
  • František Gebauer, Lubomír Veleta, Tomáš Lipták: Organizační Struktura a personální obsazení Státní prokuratury a Státního soudu, Generální prokuratury a Nejvyššího soudu, Jarsten Progergericht, Jaroslav Prosecutor, and the General Prosecutor's Office, etc. Československá justice ... part II., Praha 2004, p. 46ff.
  • Jan Lamka: Vývoj československého soudnictví v letech 1948–1960 [The development of the Czechoslovak jurisdiction in the years 1948–1960], Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, Pilsen 2015, online at: otik.uk.zcu.cz / ...
  • Otakar Liska et al .: Tresty smrti vykonané v Československu v letech 1918-1989 [Full Stretched death sentences in Czechoslovakia in the years 1918-1989], Sesit no. 2 (2006 edition), material of the Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism SKPV PČR ( ÚDV, German Authority for Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism), Praha 2006, ISBN 80-86621-09-X , online at: policie.cz / ...
  1. ↑ a b Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ... , Brno 2014/2015, page 7, there also fn. 4 and 5, online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  2. ↑ a b c Zákon 50/1923 Sb. And Zákon 51/1923 Sb. [Act 50/1923 and 51/1923], in: Collection of Laws of Czechoslovakia, online at: aplikace.mvcr.cz / ... , page 207 ( Law 50/1923) and 218 (Law 51/1923)
  3. ↑ Alois Rašín , curriculum vitae of the portal Finančníci.cz / Osobnosti.cz, online at: financnici.cz / ...
  4. ↑ Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ... , Brno 2014/2015, page 36ff., Online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  5. ↑ Pavel Šrámek: Study a materiály předválečné armády [Studies and materials of the pre-war army], portal Vojenstvi.cz, online at: armada.vojenstvi.cz / ...
  6. ↑ a b c Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ... , Brno 2014/2015, page 10, online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  7. ↑ Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ... , Brno 2014/2015, page 123 (including fn. 263), online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  8. ↑ Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ... , Brno 2014/2015, page 136, online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  9. ↑ Státní úřad statistický: Statistická ročenka Republiky Československé [Statistical Yearbook of the Czechoslovak Republic], Prague: Orbis, tiskařská, nakladatelská a novinářská společnost akciová. 1938. p. 227. quoted in Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ..., Brno 2014/2015, page 136, fn. 278, online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  10. ↑ Kazda, Vybrané aspekty ... , Brno 2014/2015, page 124, online at: is.muni.cz / ...
  11. ↑ a b Zákon 68/1935 Sb. [Law 68/1935], in: Collection of Laws of Czechoslovakia, online at: ftp.aspi.cz / ...
  12. ↑ Kaplan, The political processes ..., Munich 1986, page 12ff.
  13. ↑ Před 72 lety vznikly lidové soudy. Vynesly stovky trestů smrti a doživotí [People's courts were established 72 years ago. They passed hundreds of death sentences and life sentences], Report on the judiciary of Czechoslovakia after 1945, in: Portal news magazine iDNES.cz of June 20, 1917, online at: idnes.cz / ...
  14. ↑ Decree 16/1945 - Decree of the President of the Republic on the punishment of Nazi criminals, traitors and their accomplices and on the extraordinary people's courts of June 19, 1945, so-called Retribution Law ( Decree presidenta republiky o potrestání nacistických zločinců, zrádců a jejich pomaha lidových soudech - retribuční zákon), in: Portal Zákony pro lidi, online at: zakonyprolidi.cz / ...
  15. ↑ Decree 17/1945 - Decree of the President of the Republic on the National Court of June 19, 1945 ( Decree presidenta republiky o Národním soudu ), in: Portal Zákony pro lidi, online at: zakonyprolidi.cz / ...
  16. ↑ a b c Zákon 231/1948 Sb. And Zákon 232/1948 Sb. [Law 231/1948 and 232/1948], in: Collection of Laws of Czechoslovakia, online at: aplikace.mvcr.cz / ... , page 1461 ( Law 231/1948) and 1473 (Law 232/1948)
  17. ↑ Jan Lamka, Vývoj československého soudnictví ... , Pilsen 2015, page 15ff., Online at: otik.uk.zcu.cz / ...
  18. ↑ komunistická justice , article from the Totalita.cz portal , online at: totalita.cz / ...
  19. ↑ a b c Jaroslav Vorel et al., Československá justice ... Part II , Praha 2004, p. 15, online at: policie.cz / ...
  20. ↑ a b c Michal Škerle: Státní soud a Státní prokuratura a jejich role v politických procesech [State court and public prosecutor's office and their role in political processes], Masaryk University, Brno 2010, using archive sources, pp. 24 and 25, online : is.muni.cz / ...
  21. ↑ František Gebauer et al., Organizační Struktura ... , Praha 2004, p. 46f., Online at: policie.cz / ...
  22. ↑ a b Otakar Liška et al .: Tresty smrti ... , Praha 2006, page 7, online at: policie.cz / ...
  23. ↑ a b c d e Jaroslav Vorel et al., Československá justice ... Part II , Praha 2004, p. 237, online at: policie.cz / ...
  24. ↑ a b c Kaplan, The political processes ..., Munich 1986, page 105
  25. ↑ a b Zákon č. 66/1952 Sb. [Act 66/1952], in: Portal Zákony pro lidi, online at: zakonyprolidi.cz/
  26. ↑ František Gebauer et al., Organizační Struktura ... , Praha 2004, p. 46 fn 1, online at: policie.cz / ...
  27. ↑ František Gebauer et al., Organizační Struktura ... , Praha 2004, p. 63, online at: policie.cz / ...
  28. ↑ Petr Mallota: Dokumentace popravených z politických důvodů 1948−1989 , material of the ÚSTR, online (archived) at: ustrcr.cz / ... , here also note 6
  29. ↑ Prokop Tomek: Oběti komunistického režimu [Victims of the Communist System], publication of the ÚVD (Authority for Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism), online at: policie.cz / ...
  30. ↑ František Gebauer et al., Organizační Struktura ... , Praha 2004, p. 48, online at: policie.cz / ...
  31. ↑ a b Jiří Kabele: Z kapitalismu do socialismu a zpět [From capitalism to socialism and back], 584 pages, Nakladatelství Karolinum, Praha 2005, ISBN 8024623862 , page 250 (fn 490), online at: books.google.de/. ..
  32. ↑ a b The Significance of the Trials of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia , Eastern Europe Info No. 51/1983, Czechoslovakia '83, ed. from the Socialist East European Committee, Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1983, page 67, ISSN 0724-083X
  33. ↑ Peter Marejka: Politické procesy v Československu (1948-1954) [Political processes in Czechoslovakia (1948-1954)], in: Studia Iuricica Cassoviensia 2/2018, publication series of the Faculty of Law of the UPJŠ in Košice, online at: sic.pravo .upjs.sk / ... , page 88
  34. ↑ Otakar Liška et al .: Tresty smrti ... , Praha 2006, page 36f., Online at: policie.cz / ...
  35. ↑ a b Zákon 319/1948 Sb. [Law 319/1948], in: Portal Zákony pro lidi, online at: zakonyprolidi.cz / ...
  36. ↑ Jaroslav Vorel et al., Československá justice ... Part II , Praha 2004, p. 62, online at: policie.cz / ...
  37. ↑ Jaroslav Vorel et al., Československá justice ... Part II , Praha 2004, p. 155, online at: policie.cz / ...
  38. ↑ Jaroslav Vorel et al., Československá justice ... Part I , Praha 2003, p. 9, online at: policie.cz / ...