The League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith Canada has asked the House of Commons for amendments to the federal criminal code that would make it possible to bring Nazi war criminals to trial in Canada.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has said it has information on some 150 suspected Nazi war criminals who entered Canada after World War II. But others, including researchers and experts on the subject, say that as many as 3,000 Nazi war criminals found refuge in Canada.
In a letter to MP Blaine Thacker, chairman of the House Justice and Legal Affairs Committee, David Matas, the League’s national chairman, urged that the offenses of war crimes and crimes against humanity be added to Bill C-18. The bill is an omnibus criminal code amendments bill referred to the committee after receiving its second reading in Parliament last December.
Matas said Nazi war criminals in Canada should be brought to justice by “any appropriate legal means,” including extradition and denaturalization and deportation. Extradition was used in the case of Albert Helmut Rauca, charged in the murders of 11,584 Lithuanian Jews. He was extradited to West Germany in May, 1983, where he died before his trial began.
TECHNICAL PROBLEMS CITED
But Matas said that technical problems limit the effectiveness of both extradition and denaturalization and deportation. Most suspected war criminals in Canada are from Eastern European countries with which Canada does not have extradition treaties, and West Germany refuses to ask for their extradition. And the government has said denaturalization applies only to those alleged war criminals who lied to immigration officials about their Nazi past — but most were not even asked, Matas pointed out.
Therefore, he said in his letter, “legal means must exist for the prosecution in Canada of these international criminals.” Matas pointed out to the committee that the Charter of Rights was amended specifically to allow for this sort of legislation.
Section 11(g) of the Charter permits retroactive legislation to make an act a crime under Canadian law that was “criminal under international law or according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations” at the time it was committed. “Introducing that legislation now would complete the process begun by the Charter,” Matas said.
CORRECTION: A report in the January 31 Bulletin on a lawsuit to compel the U.S. government to release documents regarding Josef Mengele, inadvertently referred to the head of the CIA as William Colby. It is William Casey.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
