EDITORIAL

Prosecuting war crimes: déjà vu

For many of us in the United States, recent events in Canada seem like a very bad case of déjà vu.

We are speaking, of course, about the Canadian government's decision to pursue prosecution of Nazi war crimes suspects via civil - rather than criminal - proceedings. The rationale: The previous "made in Canada" approach of prosecuting suspects in such cases was not succeeding. So, to increase its "success rate" in the face of accusations that it is "soft" on war criminals, Canada opted to change the rules - no matter that the cause of justice is not served.

Does this remind anyone of the Office of Special Investigations, the Nazi-hunting arm of the U.S. Justice Department? That agency was guilty of such zeal in its activity that the cause of justice was subverted on more than one occasion. The most notorious example, of course, was the case of John Demjanjuk, in which the Justice Department was so set on getting a big-time war criminal that it ignored evidence which pointed to another man as being "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, and then purposely withheld that information and other exculpatory evidence from the defense. Ultimately, Mr. Demjanjuk was found not guilty by Israel's Supreme Court and was allowed to return to the United States, where a federal appeals court later ruled that OSI prosecutors had "acted with reckless disregard for the truth" and committed "fraud on the court."

To add to our sick feeling of "here we go again," there is the fact that, not only has the Canadian government chosen to follow the U.S. example in pursuing suspected war criminals via civil cases, but it has hired a former director of the OSI, Neal Sher, as a special consultant to the Ministry of Justice. The appointment was defended by Justice Minister Ann McLellan who said the new appointee is "one of the world's leading experts in dealing with war criminals." Oh sure, and given his experience with the discredited OSI, he brings with him a wealth of knowledge on how to use the justice system to win a case, i.e., how to lower the legal standards to obtain the end result: denaturalization and deportation of war crimes suspects. We emphasize "suspects" because under the "American model" they are never proven to be war criminals - just liars, persons who misrepresented information on their applications for entry into the country.

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress has announced that it will challenge the Canadian government in court over its decision to denaturalize and deport suspects rather than try them on war crimes charges. The UCC has called this decision "a grossly unjust course of action by the government against its own citizens," while reiterating its position that all war criminals should be brought to justice and tried in criminal proceedings using Canadian rules of evidence.

On the other side of the issue are groups like the Canadian Jewish Congress. Two of the organization's leaders noted in a recent letter to the editor of The Globe and Mail that the new approach is "the only way Canada might bring some justice for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust."

They were responding to the newspaper's January 14 editorial, which said the following about Canada's new tack on war criminals: "It's an easy solution with an uneasy feel to it. Singling out certain individuals for a retrospective look at their immigration documents, based on information that cannot prevail in a criminal court, has the whiff of selective enforcement of our laws."

Such an approach - no matter how good its intentions - cannot be tolerated.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 1, 1998, No. 5, Vol. LXVI

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