think you skipped a paragraph
Defense attorneys for communist officials have maintained that the difficulty lies in the fact that hundreds of thousands of political opponents were tried under laws of the DDR. Although these laws were designed to smother political dissent and grossly violated basic human rights and democratic norms, they were nonetheless laws promulgated by a sovereign state. How could one justly try individual Stasi officers, prosecutors, and judges who had simply been fulfilling their legal responsibility to pursue and punish violators of the law?
