129 Generally speaking, customary international law has gradually expanded the notion of crimes against humanity laid down in the London Agreement. With specific reference to the question at issue, it should be noted that, except for a very few isolated cases such as Finta, 350 national jurisprudence 351 includes many cases where courts found that in the civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated.” 350 The Supreme Court of Canada held that: “[W]ith respect to crimes against humanity the additional element is that the inhumane acts were based on discrimination against or the persecution of an identifiable group of people.” (R. v. Finta, [1994] 1 SCR 701, at p. 813, majority judgement delivered by Cory J.). 351 In this regard, mention can be made of some further cases: Ahlbrecht, decided by the Dutch Special Court of Cassation on 11 April 1949 (Nederlandse Jurisprudentie, 1949, no. 425, pp. 747-751); J. and R., decision of the German Supreme Court for the British Zone, judgement dated 16 November 1948, S. StS 65/48 in Entscheidungen des Obersten Gerichtshofes für die Britische Zone, vol. I, pp. 167-171; Enigster, decided by the District Court of Tel Aviv. As the District Court of Tel Aviv rightly stressed in the Enigster case, some crimes against humanity do not require a persecutory intent. In its Decision of 4 January 1952, the court stated the following: “As to crimes against humanity, we have no hesitation in rejecting the argument of the Defence that any of the acts detailed in the definition of crime against humanity have to be performed with an intention to persecute the victim on national, religious or political grounds. It is clear that this condition only applies when the constituent element of the crime is persecution itself. The legislator found it necessary to separate persecution from the other types of action by a semi-colon and to precede the word ‘persecution’ with the words ‘and also‘, thus clearly establishing that persecution stands by itself, and that it alone is subject to that condition.” (18 International Law Reports 1951, p. 541). It should be noted, however, that the Court was clearly wrong as far as the question of the famous semi-colon was concerned; it is well known that in actual fact the Protocol of 6 October 1945 replaced the semi-colon with a colon. (For the text of the Protocol see Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, vol. I, pp. XVI-XIX). Reference can also be made to some cases decided by the German Supreme Court for the British Zone. The Appeals Chamber will briefly mention three of them: R., P. et al. and H. In a Decision of 27 July 1948 (S. StS 19/48), the court pronounced on the case of R. In 1944, a member of the NSDAP (the German National Socialist Worker’s Party) and the NSKK (National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps) had denounced another member of the NSDAP and of the SA (Stormtroopers) for insulting the leadership of NSDAP; as a result of this denunciation the victim had been brought to trial three times and eventually sentenced to death. (The sentence had not been carried out because the Russians had occupied Germany in the interim). The Court held that the denunciation could constitute a crime against humanity if it could be proved that the agent had intended to hand over the victim to the “uncontrollable power structure of the [Nazi] party and State”, knowing that as a consequence of his denunciation the victim was likely to be caught in an arbitrary and violent system (Entscheidungen des Obersten Gerichtshofes für die Britische Zone, vol. I, pp. 45-49 at p. 47). In a Decision of 7 December 1948 (S. StS 111/48), in the P. et al. case, the same court gave a very liberal interpretation to the notion of crimes against humanity as laid down in Control Council Law No. 10, extending it among other things to inhumane acts committed against members of the military. During the night after Germany’s partial capitulation (5 May 1945) four German marines had tried to escape from Denmark back to Germany. The next day they were caught by Danes and delivered to German troops, who court-martialled and sentenced three of them to death for desertion; on the very day of the general capitulation of Germany, i.e. 10 May 1945, the three were executed. The German Supreme Court found that the five members of the courtmartial were guilty of complicity in a crime against humanity. According to the Supreme Court, the glaring discrepancy between the offence and the punishment constituted a clear manifestation of the Nazis’ brutal and intimidatory system of justice, which denied the very essence of humanity in blind reference to the allegedly superior exigencies of the Nazi State; there was “an intolerable degradation of the victim[s] to mere means for the pursuit of a goal, hence the depersonalisation and reification of human beings.” (Entscheidungen des Obersten Gerichtshofes für die Britische Zone, ibid., vol. I, pp. 217-229 at p. 220). Consequently, by Case No.: -94-1-A 15 July 1999