Part of Polish Resettlement Bill – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 4 Mawrth 1947.
In fact, it is not law anywhere at the present time. I ask the Committee to look at Subsection (2) of the new Clause. It says that members of the said forces, that is the Polish forces under British command, who have neither joined the Resettlement Corps on the one hand nor gone back to Poland on the other,
shall be under obligation to observe, in matters concerning their discipline and internal administration, the rules in force as to those matters under the law of Poland on the first day of January, nineteen hundred and forty-five, and a member of any of the said forces who contravenes or fails to observe any of the said rules in relation to which a punishment is thereby prescribed shall be guilty of an offence…and shall be…liable…to the punishment prescribed by those rules:
It may well be that under Polish military law as it existed at 1st January, 1945 soldiers may have been liable, for all I know to the contrary, to be flogged for quite a petty offence. The right hon. Gentleman suggests that Polish military law is milder than British military law, but before the House comes to a judgment on an issue of this sort, we ought to know what Polish military law was on 1st January, 1945. Until we are so informed, it may well be that the punishments are more severe and, in fact, may be of a character of which the people of this country would wholly disapprove. Yet we are invited to hand over to a gentleman who is known as the Administrator, the power to enforce this alien law to carry out these alien punishments and to do so without any right of appeal to any British court of law. In the difficulty in which we find ourselves I very much prefer the solution suggested by the hon. Member for Luton (Mr. Warbey). If there is to be military law imposed upon these people surely it should be British rather than any foreign law? Then at any rate we could ask questions of the Secretary of State for War in regard to punishments imposed or sentences of courts-martial.
As it is, as far as I can see, it will be impossible to raise any question in this House relating to any of these decisions, judgments or sentences imposed by the administrator or delegated by him to Polish subordinates.