Quest
for ‘Nazis’ Hurts the Innocent
By Marco Levytsky
In a recent
commentary in the Winnipeg Free Press, David Matas, senior legal counsel to
B’nai Brith Canada, attempted to justify a process that undermines the civil
liberties of more than six million naturalized Canadians, under the guise of
bringing “Nazi war criminals” to justice.
He
named four individuals –Jacob Fast, Wasyl Odynsky, Helmut Oberlander and
Vladimir Katriuk–and claimed that because of compelling evidence linking them
to Nazi-era crimes against humanity, the War Crimes Unit of the Department of
Justice had prosecuted them.
As
any lawyer knows, prosecuting attorneys may determine whatever they wish, but
it is meaningless if the court finds otherwise. In none of these four cases did
the federal courts find any evidence of any individual crimes whatsoever –let
alone “compelling” evidence.
What
the court did find was that “on a balance of probabilities” they lied about
their past upon coming to
It
falls way short of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of criminal court.
And there is no way to prove conclusively whether they lied or not upon coming
to
The
final decision on the revocation of a person’s citizenship rests with a
committee of cabinet, which makes the government both prosecutor and court of
last appeal.
Since
there is no judicial appeal process, no precedents can be established. Judges
have ruled both for and against respondents in similar cases, so the whole
system amounts to a judicial lottery where the victim’s fate depends upon
whichever judge he gets.
But
because the government is under no obligation to present any evidence of any
individual crimes under our current citizenship revocation system, they haven’t
done so. And in the most recent cases they haven’t even bothered to charge the
individuals with any individual crimes.
In
the three cases where the Department of Justice did attempt to bring evidence
to court, it was thrown out by the judges because it had been obtained by the
KGB through torture.
One
may well ask what is the government doing bringing forward evidence by an agency
well-known for its crimes against humanity? This question should have been
raised when upon announcing the launch of the Denaturalization &
Deportation policy in a January 1995 news release, the government stated that a
major step forward in its investigations was an agreement that gave it access
to KGB files, but unfortunately it wasn’t.
Considering
the source of the government’s charges against these men, it is not a
coincidence that all four individuals cited by Matas come from Ukraine as do
the two individuals whose case are now before the court–Josef Furman of
Edmonton, and Jura Skomatchuk of St. Catharines.
In
the Odynsky case, one of those where no individual crime was alleged in the
government’s Statement of Claim against him, Justice Andrew MacKay found that
his service as a guard at a labour camp was involuntary (in fact he was
threatened with death after he attempted an escape) and that there was no
evidence that he participated in the mistreatment of any prisoner anywhere at
any time.
In
the case of Oberlander, whose citizenship was revoked by cabinet order, it was
reinstated by a unanimous vote of the Federal Court of Appeal, after
Oberlander’s lawyer took the unique step of appealing the revocation process
itself. In this May 31, 2004 ruling, which was not appealed to the Supreme
Court, Justice Robert Decary, with the concurrence of Justices J. Edgar Sexton
and B. Malone told the government “it cannot apply the war criminals policy to
a person unless it first satisfies itself, to use the very words of the policy,
that ‘there is evidence of direct involvement in or complicity of war crimes or
crimes against humanity.’ ”
The
fact that revocation of citizenship can be used in such an arbitrary manner
prompted the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Citizenship and Immigration
last year to determine “that the potential loss of citizenship is of such
fundamental significance to the person concerned that fraud should be proven
beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court, that the legal protections of
the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms–specifically sections 7 to 14–must
apply, and there should be no special limits placed on the right to appeal.”
Until
those recommendations are enacted, the Charter rights of every immigrant are in
jeopardy.
Marco
Levytsky is the editor and publisher of the Edmonton-based, Ukrainian
News. This article appeared in the