95 214. Mention must now be made of some cases brought before Italian courts after World War II concerning war crimes committed either by civilians or by military personnel belonging to the armed forces of the so-called “Repubblica Sociale Italiana” (“RSI”), a de facto government under German control established by the Fascist leadership in central and northern Italy, following the declaration of war by Italy against Germany on 13 October 1943. After the war several persons were brought to trial for crimes committed between 1943 and 1945 against prisoners of war, Italian partisans or members of the Italian army fighting against the Germans and the RSI. Some of these trials concerned the question of criminal culpability for acts perpetrated by groups of persons where only one member of the group had actually committed the crime. 215. In D’Ottavio et al., on appeal from the Assize Court of Teramo, the Court of Cassation on 12 March 1947 pronounced upon one of these cases. Some armed civilians had given unlawful pursuit to two prisoners of war who had escaped from a concentration camp, in order to capture them. One member of the group had shot at the prisoners without intending to kill them, but one had been wounded and had subsequently died as a result. The trial court held that all the other members of the group were accountable not only for “illegal restraint” (sequestro di persona) but also for manslaughter (omicidio preterintenzionale). The Court of Cassation upheld this finding. It held that for this type of criminal liability to arise, it was necessary that there exist not only a material but also a psychological “causal nexus” between the result all the members of the group intended to bring about and the different actions carried out by an individual member of that group. The court went on to point out that: [i]ndeed the responsibility of the participant (concorrente) […] is not founded on the notion of objective responsibility […], but on the fundamental principle of the concurrence of interdependent causes […]; by virtue of this principle all the participants are accountable for the crime both where they directly cause it and where they indirectly cause it, in keeping with the well-known canon causa causae est causa causati.270 270 See handwritten text of the (unpublished) judgement, p. 6 (unofficial translation; kindly provided by the Italian Public Record Office, Rome; on file with the International Tribunal’s Library). See also Giustizia penale, 1948, Part II, col. 66, no. 71 (containing a headnote on the judgement). Case No.: -94-1-A 15 July 1999