A federal commission announced last week that it has compiled a list of 660 suspected Nazi war criminals who now live in Canada or may have lived here and is weighing evidence against them.
Former Quebec Superior Court Justice Jules Deschenes who comprises the one-man commission outlined his next steps in the investigation. He has established a committee of six lawyers chaired by Douglas Adra, of Winnipeg, to review the evidence and report back on September I. He has also set up a panel of lawyers and academicians to recommend by September I how Nazi war criminals found to be living in Canada might be brought to justice under existing or new legislation.
The announcement stated: “It is our mission to do everything humanly possible to avoid doing an injustice to anyone through ignorance of the facts, and the commission must work through an immense quantity of documents that have been accumulating in public and private archives both in Canada and abroad for the last 40 years.”
FORMER OFFICIAL TO GIVE TESTIMONY
Former Solicitor General Robert Kaplan, a Liberal member of Parliament, is expected to testify before the commission on July 9. He has complained that the present Solicitor General, Elmer Mac Kay, has denied him access to records and files to aid his testimony.
The Deschenes commission must render its final report and recommendations by December 31 1985. It has yet to decide whether to travel abroad to gather more evidence before concluding its investigation. It must also decide whether or not to go to the Soviet Union for records of alleged war criminals. Soviet justice and legal procedures are considered unreliable here.
The U.S. Department of Justice has made extensive use of evidence provided by the Soviet Union in tracing Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. This has brought an outcry from Baltic and Ukrainian ethnic groups in the U.S. which consider anything from a Communist source suspect. Most of the war criminals rounded up in the U.S. so far come from Baltic or Eastern European countries occupied by the Germans in World War II. The Justice Department has said that all material from Soviet sources is carefully scrutinized and tested under U.S. rules of evidence.
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