COMMUNIST TRIALS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 249, 29 July 1940, Page 3

COMMUNIST TRIALS.

THE PROCEDURE IN PARIS.

CONTRAST WITH THE SOVIET. The trial of 35 former Communist Deputies began yesterday before a military huge Palais De Justice (writes William Henry Chamberlin on March 21 to the “Christian Science Monitor.’’) The charges against the deputies are that they revived the Communist Party under another name after it had been legally forbidden last September and the circulation of a letter demanding immediate peace, following a Soviet initiative in this direction early in October. Sixty of the 73 Communists in the French Chamber and one out of two in the Senate, the veteran Marcel Cachin, were expelled during February. The Communists in the last French parliamentary election in 1936 had polled about 1,500,000 votes. Niue other Communist deputies, including the party leaders, Maurice Thoreji and Andre Marty, who fled the country or are hiding, will be tried in absentia.

Although the greater part of the trial of the Communists, following a request from the military prosecutor, will probably be held behind closed doors, the first session was open to the public, and your correspondent was struck by the contrast between the atmosphere of this trial and that characterising the political trials which lie attended in Moscow.

A considerable part of the audience consisted of relatives and friends of the accused, and during the intermission, gestures of greeting and long-distance kisses were freely exchanged between the prisoners and their relatives. No such procedure was remotely thinkable at the Moscow trial, where a regular feature w r as that of a son, often no doubt acting under strong pressure, demanding the execution of his father. Even under wartime conditions there is a vast gulf between justice in a democratic country and under a totalitarian dictatorship. It certainly requires vastly less moral courage for the French Communist, furnished with sympathetic counsel, supported by a still functioning underground organisation and certain that his family will not be persecuted for his political ideas, to maintain his position that it has for a Soviet prisoner, whose endurance is often undermined by threats against the liberty and even the life of his nearest relatives.