Justice Minister Ramon Hnatyshyn is negotiating to allow Canadian investigators to take sworn testimony in the courts of nine nations that can be used to prosecute 22 alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada, it was learned Monday.
The new Criminal Code allows Canada to try its citizens for crimes committed on foreign soil, but only after sworn testimony is collected in the countries concerned, according to William Hobson of the Justice Ministry. The testimony, on video tape, may be presented as evidence in Canadian courts.
He said the justice minister is negotiating with the governments of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and West Germany for permission to take testimony about the suspects.
Hobson was recently in Hungary, where he gathered information that led to formal charges against the first of the suspects, Hungarian-born Imre Finta. The 76-year-old restaurateur was arrested in Hamilton, Ont., on Dec. 9 and is free on $100,000 (Canadian) bail pending an appearance in federal court this Friday.
Finta was the first suspect whose name was made public. He was identified by Sabina Citron, head of the Holocaust Remembrance Association, and several other Holocaust survivors as a former captain in the Honveds, a mounted police unit in Nazi-controlled Hungary during World War II, who tortured and murdered Jews and looted their possessions.
The Justice Ministry has charged that Finta oversaw the confinement and transportation of 8,615 Jews to concentration camps in Hungary, Austria and Poland in 1944 and that he is guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of an unspecified number of Jews.
His trial is expected to begin early next year, but no date has been announced. “We are working as quickly as we can,” Hobson said.
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