Attorneys for Albert Helmut Rauca, a naturalized Canadian charged with the wartime murders of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, said today they may appeal a ruling by the Ontario Supreme Court ordering his extradition to West Germany to stand trial.
The unanimous decision upheld a lower court ruling holding Rauca, 74, should be extradited to face trial on five indictments charging he murdered 11,864 Lithuanian Jews in a Nazi camp in Kaunas. Rauca came to Canada legally in 1950, became a citizen in 1956 and was arrested last June after witnesses identified him as a former Nazi enforcer in Lithuania.
The Ontario Supreme Court agreed that Rauca’s constitutional rights, under Canada’s new Charter of Rights, would be violated by extradition but held that the prosecution had succeeded in demonstrating that such a violation was justifiable in a democratic society on such charges.
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