Ottawa Citizen, Canada
Aug 12 2007
Limit war criminals appeals, experts say
Marianne White, CanWest News Service
Published: Sunday, August 12, 2007
QUEBEC – More than two years after the Supreme Court of Canada deemed
Leon Mugesera a war criminal and ordered him out of the country, the
exiled ethnic Hutu hardliner is still living in Quebec. And his case
is not unique. Many war criminals have managed to stay in Canada for
years despite Ottawa’s ongoing efforts to expel them.
"It’s one of the tragedies of Canada," says Sergio Karas, a
Toronto-based immigration lawyer and co-chair of the International
Bar Association.
In the 1990s the federal government decided to strip suspected war
criminals of their citizenship and deport them, on the grounds they
had lied about their past when they entered the country, making their
status illegitimate.
"There is a systemic problem with the refugee process in Canada.
Foreigners who have committed heinous crimes can keep on fighting for
years on end, constantly escaping prosecution and deportation," Karas
says. "What kind of message does it send to the rest of the world?"
he added.
Earlier this year, representatives of the Armenian National Committee
of Canada, the Darfur Association of Canada, PAGE-Rwanda and the Roma
Community Centre joined Jewish groups in demanding that Immigration
Minister Diane Finley deport six men accused of aiding the Nazis in
the Holocaust (Helmut Oberlander, Vladimir Katriuk, Wasyl Odynsky,
Jacob Fast, Jura Skomatczuk, and Josef Furman).
In 2006, Canada deported 41 immigrants found involved in war crimes
or crimes against humanity, according to a federal report. But it
also mentioned that 59 removal orders could not be carried out
because of impediments such as a lack of travel documents, while
another 39 were awaiting a pre-removal risk assessment.
The report only names cases that have been the subject of public
attention.
"Anyone that’s subject to removal from Canada can request a
pre-removal risk assessment and that is to determine whether there is
a risk of persecution, torture or threat to life if they’re
deported," said a spokeswoman from Citizenship and Immigration
Canada. "If they are subject to those conditions, they are not
removed. Then they would have a stay of removal until such time as
those conditions change," said Karen Shadd-Evelyn.
The Mugesera case has received a lot of attention since he started
fighting his deportation in 1995. His expulsion has been put on hold
while the federal government determined whether his life could be in
danger in Rwanda. The risk-assessment process has been going on since
June 2005.
Shadd-Evelyn couldn’t comment on Mugesera’s case and couldn’t say
what was taking so long.
"There is no doubt about the determination of the Canadian
authorities to get him out, but he (Mugesera) has various layers of
appeal and he is slowly using them all up. So, the time will run out,
but it does seem frustratingly long for people," says William
Schabas, Canada’s foremost expert on international criminal law.
Recently, Mugesera called on Justice Minister Robert Nicholson to try
him under Canada’s war crimes legislation. But Schabas says Mugesera
is not entitled to a trial in Canada since the highest court ruled
unanimously in 2005 that he was "inadmissible" to remain in the
country under immigration law.
"Mugesera has no right to be tried in Canada. He can ask for it, but
he has no legal remedy. This is just a political statement by him.
And unless it resonates with the (Justice) minister, it doesn’t mean
anything," says Schabas, who is director of the Irish Centre for
Human Rights at the University of Ireland, in Galway.
"It’s always better to have people stand trial where the crime was
committed because there you have judges who understand the context
and witnesses who are there," argued Schabas.
He went to Rwanda recently to assess the judiciary system and the new
prisons and he believes Mugesera could stand a fair trial in Rwanda.
But Amnesty International still expresses serious concern of the
Rwandan government’s ability to guarantee genocide suspects a fair
trial.
A former university lecturer, Mugesera is accused of giving a speech
in 1992 in which he called Rwandan Tutsis "cockroaches" and
encouraged his fellow Hutus to kill them.
The Supreme Court said the speech planted the seeds of Rwanda’s
bloody ethnic massacre. Between 500,000 and 800,000 members of the
Tutsi minority and moderate members of the Hutu majority were
slaughtered, most hacked to death with machetes.
Schabas recalls his trip to Rwanda shortly after Mugesera gave his
speech.
"I’ve always said I don’t know what he said in the speech because I
don’t understand the language, but I know how people reacted to it,
and there was not doubt about the meaning."
Karas, the immigration lawyer, pointed out that many other
undesirable criminals have eluded deportation for much longer than
Mugesera. He cited the case of Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad, a
convicted terrorist who hijacked a plane, who has been thwarting his
expulsion since 1988.
"We need to impose limits to the number of appeals for those who have
committed crimes and who want to stall forever," said Karas. "We have
to do it especially for the victims, in the Rwandan community for
instance, who must be angry to see those criminals walking down the
streets."