Canada’s Supreme Court has ordered the government to pay thousands of dollars in legal costs to a man it prosecuted for Nazi war crimes before dropping the case against him.
The Sept. 23 ruling upheld a March 1992 decision by a lower court ordering the government to pay $151,000 (Canadian) in legal costs incurred by Michael Pawlowski.
Pawlowski, 75, a retired carpenter from Renfrew, Ontario, was charged Dec. 15, 1989 with eight counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the 1942 deaths of 410 Jews and 80 Poles in the Minsk region of Nazi-occupied White Russia (today Belarus), where he allegedly served as a local policeman.
The Justice Department stayed his prosecution March 13, 1992, following the death of a key witness and a crippling ruling against a government bid to send a commission to the former Soviet Union to gather and videotape testimony from elderly witnesses unable to come to Canada to testify.
It was the third unsuccessful prosecution under war crimes legislation enacted by Canada’s Parliament in 1987.
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