Before the occupation Ečer was born on 31 July 1893. He was born into a family of a merchant, later a railway worker. He graduated in 1911 from the classical
gymnasium in
Kroměříž, then he enrolled at the law faculty of
University of Vienna, but he did not graduate because he had to enlist in the army in 1915. After the war, he completed his legal studies at
Charles University in
Prague, where he received his
Doctorate of Law in 1920, and for a short time was a trainee at the
district court in Kroměříž, and later at the
territorial court in Brno. Eventually, however, he established his own
law practice specializing in
criminal law in
Brno, where he also married Ludmila Galleová in 1922. The couple eventually had two daughters, Naděžda (born 1922) and Jarmila (born 1926). He published his first work,
Guilt and Morality, which is devoted to the trial of Hilda Haniková, who hired a murderer to kill her own husband. Ečer actively opposed the rising German
Nazism, which he recognized as a major danger for the future, and became, for example, a member of the Committee for the Relief of Democratic Spain. In 1938, he publicly agitated for Czechoslovakia's readiness to defend itself against the threat of Nazi Germany, and lectured and persuaded public officials in England, which brought him to the attention of the
Gestapo.
After the occupation After the
occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated with his family via
Zagreb and
Belgrade to
Paris, where he participated in the
Czechoslovak National Committee. There he also wrote a thesis
The Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the Establishment of the "Protectorate" in the Light of International Law, which, however, was not published due to the German attack. After the fall of France, they went to
Marseille, where the Czechoslovak consulate was still functioning, but they were deemed undesirable by the
Vichist government and so they moved to
Nice, where the Institute for the Study of International Law was moved from Paris. However, as the city was threatened with occupation by Fascist Italy, they fled to the UK in 1942 via Spain and Portugal. Here Bohuslav Ečer became an employee of the Foreign Office
Czechoslovak Government in Exile, and later was an associate of the Minister of Justice
Jaroslav Stránský. He was delegated by the government-in-exile as Czechoslovakia's representative to the
United Nations War Crimes Commission, where he eventually successfully pushed for the declaration of
United Nations as an international crime. In addition to him, he also interviewed e.g. Reich Protector
Kurt Daluege, Reich Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel, SS General Bernhard Voss and Reich Minister and Reich Chancellery Chief
Hans Lammers. After the Nuremberg Trials, he served as a judge of the
International Court of Justice in
The Hague, where he ruled in the so-called "
Corfu Strait Incident" between Great Britain and Albania, dissenting from the majority decision on Albania's responsibility. He described his experiences throughout this period in the popular books
The Nuremberg Trial,
How I Prosecuted Them,
Law in the Struggle with Nazism and
Lessons from the Nuremberg Trial for the Slavs.
Post-war years In 1948, he became first
associate professor and then
professor of international criminal law at the
Faculty of Law of Masaryk University in Brno, where he headed the Institute for International Criminal Law and published the script
Handbook of Public International Law. He also published a scientific monograph
Development and Foundations of International Criminal Law. However, he did not stay there for long, as the faculty was closed down in 1950. Although Bohuslav Ečer remained in the university, he could not teach or publish. As a former social democrat who had taken part in the war resistance in the West and who, among other things, had defended
Milada Horáková, he gradually became a target of
StB. However, when they came to arrest him in 1954, as he was to be one of the defendants in the upcoming mock trial of the so-called Brno Group, he was already a day dead. He died a quick death from a
heart attack of the left posterior chamber of his heart. His wife Ludmila escaped persecution by hiding in a psychiatric hospital, but his daughter Jarmila was sentenced to 12 years and released after
Amnesty in 1960. == Awards ==