The Canadian Supreme Court’s refusal to reopen the controversial war crimes case of Imre Finta may thwart further prosecutions of others suspected of committing atrocities during World War II.
The assessment was made by Justice Minister Alan Rock.
“The judgment does make it more difficult for us to succeed in such prosecutions,” Rock said.
He made his statement after the high court in Ottawa on June 23 turned down a request to clarify its March 24 judgment acquitting Finta.
Finta was the first person charged under Canada’s 7-year-old war crimes legislation.
Finta, 81, a captain in the pro-Nazi Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie during World War II, had been accused of forcibly confining 8,617 Jews in the southern Hungarian city of Szeged from May 16 to June 30, 1944.
He was also accused of stealing the detainees’ money, jewelry and other valuables while using threats of violence.
The detainees were later deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, where most of them perished.
By a 4-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled on March 24 that the 1990 jury acquittal of Finta should stand.
Finta’s lawyer, Douglas Christie of Victoria, British Columbia, who has defended many in Canada accused of Nazi or neo-Nazi crimes, had argued that Jews were seen as subversives in wartime Hungary.
Therefore, he said, Finta had been merely following orders.
But the government later argued that one of the high court’s justices had wrongly relied on Nazi propaganda when making his decision last March.
The government was joined by B’nai Brith Canada and the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association.
DEPENDED ON PRO-GERMAN PAPERS
The justice, Peter Corey, had cited pro-German Hungarian newspapers from 1944 which reported that Jews were disloyal to the Hungarian war effort. This “gave an air of reality” to Finta’s defense of only following orders, Corey wrote in March.
The government and the two Jewish groups asked the court to clarify its decision, arguing that following orders should not be considered an acceptable defense.
But the Supreme Court refused to offer a clarification of its earlier decision or rehear aspects of the case.
The high court’s decision “represents a failure of the Canadian justice system to come to grips with the problem of alleged war criminals within our midst,” B’nai Brith counsels David Matas and Marvin Kurz said in a statement.
“This decision sends another nail into the coffin of the criminal remedy in war crimes cases,” they wrote.
The two lawyers urged the court to launch denaturalization proceedings against Finta.
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