SLAVE LABOUR

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 256, 16 August 1950, Page 5

SLAVE LABOUR

RUSSIAN SYSTEM BRITAIN AND U.S. PRODUCE EVIDENCE (N.Z.P. A.—Copyright) (Rec. 10.0 a.m.) GENEVA, Aug. 15. According to the United Press, a joint British and United States attack on Russia’s slave labour system was launched at a meeting of the United Nations’ Econonomic and Social Council to-day. The British delegate, Mr G. T. Cor-ley-Smith, produced photostatic copies of Russian laws and decrees to show that people can be exiled to Siberian labour camps, even when their innocence is admitted by the authorities simply on grounds that they were related 1 to people alleged to have committed offences. Mr Corley-Smith said: “It comes as a bit of a shock to see this in cold print in the official text issued by the Soviet Ministry of Justice.” He added that the British Government estimates made in 1948 that 10,000,000 people had been forced into Russian slave labour camps are now much too low owing to deportation during the last three years of an estimated 3,000,000 people from Baltic States and from Moslem communities in the south. Mr Corley-Smith also produced a photostatie copy of a Czech law to show that the Czech Communist Government had introduced slave labour. “Now that we have come to the point where even a country once so progressive as Czechoslovakia is being engulfed in the rising tide of forced labour, the danger of freedom everywhere is clear,” he said. Delegates presented evidence showing that Russia is extending slavery by imposing the system upon Communist satellite countries. The debate on forced labour was deferred until the next session. Meanwhile a commission of inquiry will be set up.