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SPECIAL REPORT

OF THE

COMMITTEE

Appointed by the

BOARD OF TRADE TO ADVISE UPON APPLICATIONS FOR THE RELEASE OF PROPERTY OF EX-ENEMY ALIENS IN NECESSITOUS CIRCUMSTANCES.

Presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty.

LONDON:

PRINTED & PUBLISHED BY HIS MAJESTY'S STATIONERY

OFFICE

To be purchased through any Bookseller or directly from H.M. STATIONERY OFFICE at the following addresses: Imperial House, Kingsway, London, W.C.2, and 28 Abingdon Street, London, S.W.1; York Street, Manchester;

1 St. Andrew's Crescent, Cardiff; or 120 George Street, Edinburgh.

1924 Price 6d. net

Cmd. 2046.

Read this Board's minute of the 15th October, 1920, appointing the following Gentlemen, viz. :—

The Right Honourable Lord Justice YOUNGER, G.B.E. (Chairman);*

Brigadier-General G. K. COCKERILL, C.B., M.P., and

The Honourable Sir M. M. MACNAGHTEN, K.B.E., K.C.,
M.P.,

to be a Committee to advise on applications from ex-enemy nationals for the release of their property, chargeable in accordance with the Treaties of Peace, within the limits laid down by His Majesty's Government.

Read also a letter from the Board of Trade to Lord Justice Younger dated 15th October, 1920, announcing the limits within which the Committee should have power to recommend the release of such property.

Read also letters from the Board of Trade to Lord Justice Younger dated 16th August, 1921, and the 27th June, 1922, varying the limits mentioned above.

The Board are now pleased to add to the terms of reference to the Committee the following reference :

To advise, with due regard to the claims thereon of British subjects under the Treaties of Peace, ascertained after such inquiry as to the Committee may seem necessary, what extensions (if any) are desirable in the limits within which recommendations for the release of the property of ex-enemy nationals can be made by the Committee in any cases of special merit, to be specified, and in particular in any cases of :

A. Claimants who are of British birth or origin.

B. Claimants resident in Great Britain before the war and permitted at its close either to remain or to return there.

C. Claimants who, although ex-enemy nationals, are also

British subjects.

D. Claimants to funds of British origin or which represent earnings or savings from earnings made in this country, who, though not themselves of British origin, can reasonably be considered owing to exceptional circumstances to be entitled to special consideration.

Board of Trade,

(Signed) P. LLOYD-GREAME.

Great George Street, S.W.1.

2nd August, 1923.

Now the Right Honourable Lord Blanesburgh, G.B.E., a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary.

NOTE. The expenses incurred in the preparation of this Report amount to approximately £13. The cost of printing and publishing this Report is estimated at £9 5s.

The Board of Trade have decided to accept the recommendations made by the Committee in its Report dated the 24th December, 1923, which is printed below.

Applications by ex-enemy nationals for the release of their property must be received by the 1st August, 1924.

REPORT.

To the Right Honourable Sir PHILIP LLOYD-GREAME, K.B.E., M.C., M.P., President of the Board of Trade.

SIR,

(1.) In August last you were good enough to entrust us with the duty of advising you upon the following question :—

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"With due regard to the claims thereon of British subjects under the Treaties of Peace, ascertained after such inquiry as to the Committee may seem necessary, to advise what extensions (if any) are desirable in the limits within "which recommendations for the release of the property of ex-enemy nationals can be made by the Committee in any cases of special merit, to be specified, and in particular in any cases of :

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"A. Claimants who are of British birth or origin.
"B. Claimants resident in Great Britain before the War
and permitted at its close either to remain or to
return there.

C. Claimants who, although ex-enemy nationals, are
also British subjects.

"D. Claimants to funds of British origin or which repre-
sent earnings or savings from earnings made in
this country, who, though not
not themselves of
British origin, can reasonably be considered owing
to exceptional circumstances to be entitled to
special consideration."

(2.) As the Long Vacation had already commenced and the necessity for preliminary investigations was apparent, we did not actively enter upon the reference until the Recess was over. On our reassembly in October, Mr. Payne,* and the Public Trustee and Mr. Swain of his Department, immediately placed at our disposal all their available information likely to be of assistance to us in the Inquiry. We also had the great advantage of seeing Mr. Egerton Grey, the Controller of the Clearing Office (Enemy Debts), Cornwall House, who with his unique knowledge of the working of the clauses of the Peace Treaties relating to the settlement of debts and claims gave us the full benefit of his personal experience on all points, and more especially with regard to the position of the British creditors' claims upon the property * Second Secretary to the Board of Trade.

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now charged in pursuance of these clauses. We also had the privilege on two occasions of seeing Dr. Weiser, the Representative of the Austrian Clearing Office at Cornwall House. Dr. Weiser, at Mr. Payne's invitation, was good enough to explain to us the working of the scheme for compensating Austrian nationals who through the exercise of the powers reserved by the Financial Clauses of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye have since been dispossessed of their private property in Allied Countries. This scheme, recently introduced in pursuance of Austria's Treaty obligations to make compensation, will, provided it remains operative, have a very material bearing upon the position of these nationals in relation to their charged property in this country, and, as will be seen, it has largely influenced our recommendations with reference to the further release of that property.

(3.) So assisted, and aided also by our own experience of the working of these charges, an experience which now extends over a period of more than three years, we had reached certain definite conclusions upon the subject of our reference when the General Election supervened. It was impossible for us to meet during its progress to settle the actual terms of this Report in which these conclusions are embodied. In this way its presentation has been delayed until now.

(4.) There can, we think, be little doubt that the pressure of events has made necessary, or at any rate desirable, some expansion of those limits of exemption from the charging clauses of the different Orders in Council within which our recommendations have hitherto been confined. Two circumstances of compara tively recent occurrence have contributed to this result. The first is the catastrophic fall in the mark, which has reduced to nothing the compensation, never adequate, that is offered by the German Government to its nationals dispossessed: the second is to be found in two judicial decisions of the House of Lords which have disclosed that the range of the charge imposed by the Orders in Council following the Treaties is, both as to the individuals affected and as to the property charged, much wider than in the one case had in practice previously been assumed and in the other had in a lower Court previously been declared. As a result there has been brought within the range of the charge, firstly the property of many individuals who may, in one sense, be ex-enemy nationals, but who are more British than they are anything else and secondly, the alimentary income of, amongst others, British born married women, which by our municipal law could not be charged or alienated at all. It has, at the same time, become clear that most of the persons now included will, unless exemption is granted to them, not only lose their property here, but be left without hope of compensation elsewhere. In these circumstances it is perhaps not to be wondered at that the applications made to us for relief have been both increasingly numerous and distressing.

(5.) Now, as we ventured to suggest in our Interim Report presented to Mr. Baldwin in May of last year, our view of these

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Treaty clauses is that the power which the Allied and Associated Powers thereby reserved to themselves to appropriate the private property of enemy nationals within their respective territories found its justification in the obligation imposed by each Treaty upon the enemy Government to make compensation to its nationals so dispossessed. And the Treaty of Peace Orders, by which the charge authorised by the Treaties is in this country made effective to its fullest extent, proceed, we think, upon the same basis.

(6.) It has, we believe, been suggested that these Treaty of Peace Orders may be regarded in quite another light-as being, irrespective of any question of compensation, a revival of or substitute for the ancient prerogative right of the Sovereign of this Realm to seize the private property of enemies on land.

We cannot ourselves so regard them. The prerogative in question having been in abeyance for over one hundred years before the war, had for the duration of the war been superseded. by statute, while there had in the meantime grown up a well authenticated principle of International Law, recognised, for example, in the Hague Convention to which this country was party, that private property of an enemy subject in hostile territory may not be confiscated. Moreover, that principle had been so well esteemed in our law that so long ago as 1817 it was held by Lord Ellenborough that a title so acquired abroad would not as against the original owner of the property be recognised in an English Court.

(7.) But apart from all this we cannot think that these Orders were intended to run counter to the declarations several times judicially made in the House of Lords even during the war that such confiscation was no part of the law of this country. We find Lord Finlay, for instance, saying in that House in 1918: "It is "not the law of this country that the property of enemy subjects is confiscated."

(8.) And a closer examination of their terms makes it clear, at least to us, that the charge imposed by these Orders cannot derive from the old prerogative either as a model or an inspiration. The incidents of the two have hardly anything in common. The charge, for example, places an embargo upon an ex-enemy national's property, not only as security for the obligations of his own Government but for those of that Government's allies, which the prerogative never did. The charge again does not attach until peace has been concluded: the prerogative was only exercisable, after office found, durante bello. The charge, as now authoritatively construed, extends to the property of persons who are British subjects, which the prerogative never could touch. It extends to the property of ex-enemy nationals living in this country under the King's licence and protection, which the prerogative never did. And it extends to the property of persons under the disability of infancy, lunacy, or coverture, which probably the prerogative never reached. And in these variants you

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