Democrats, although supposedly committed to opposing the death penalty as a matter of political principle, inserted it into the Law for the Protection of the Republic and gave retrospective approval to summary executions carried out in the civil disorders of the immediate postwar period. In doing so, they made it easier for a future government to introduce similarly draconian laws for the protection of the state, and to confound a central principle of justice – that no punishments should be applied retrospectively to offences which did not carry them at the time they were committed.163 This,
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