Justice delayed again

Editorial

What is it they say about justice delayed? The nine people whose lives Michael Seifert was convicted of taking during the Second World War will be none the better for all the machinations of the Canadian judicial system. But the future of the world, it can be said with some legitimacy, depends on the execution of justice in this case and others like it.

Seifert was convicted in an Italian court seven years ago, in absentia, of nine counts of murder. Italy formally requested Seifert's extradition from Canada in 2003. Since then, Seifert has kept extradition at bay through the leisurely procedural impediments offered by Canada's justice system. He was ordered extradited in 2003 to serve his life sentence in an Italian prison – an extradition upheld by then-federal justice minister Irwin Cotler. Seifert then turned to the British Columbia Supreme Court, which ruled, finally, last month, that he had to go. Seifert's lawyer, Doug Christie, whose client roster includes some of Canada's most infamous figures, now promises to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Given the pace of Canada's judicial process, and Seifert's age of 83, his chances of escaping his sentence through the grace of natural causes is ever more probable.

Seifert was once known as the Beast of Bolzano. As an SS guard, he is reported to have taken perverse satisfaction in his acts of barbarism, which include gouging out eyes, causing a 15-year-old Jewish boy to starve to death, raping and murdering a pregnant young woman, kicking and punching to death a prisoner who tried to escape, brutally kicking two other prisoners before killing them with firearms, torturing to death a victim in an isolation cell and, with another soldier, clubbing to death a prisoner in the camp infirmary, as well as other atrocities.

As anyone who keeps up with the news is aware, for all the bluster of successive Canadian governments about doing the right thing by history, only one war criminal has ever been successfully extradited from this country.

Indeed, Canada is a destination of sorts – a haven for the world's most notorious war criminals. Dozens of these, whose return is sought by other countries, remain safe and relatively comfortable in Canada. Many, like Seifert, face justice dating back to their Nazi pasts. Other cases, like that of Desire Munyaneza, a Rwandan facing charges on two counts of genocide, two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes, relate to far more recent events.

Time has been cited as relevant and, in almost all crimes, it is. But the magnitude of the incidents in question is considered to supersede statutes of limitation. One of the reasons for this is that our civilization must make the unequivocal declaration that war crimes and crimes against humanity will be pursued by justice-seeking people for as long as they conceivably can and with an ardor undiminished by time. This is a testament not so much to our commitment to righting the wrongs of the past, but of our obligation to the future by promising any and all who may conceive the inconceivable that justice will find them no matter how far distant in time or place. This is a message Canada is failing spectacularly to articulate.

There is an irony that, at the very time when Canada's judicial process is exercising excruciating deliberation to finally deliver to Italian justice one of the 20th century's most cruel perpetrators of war crimes, an unrelated decision came down that would summarily expel a man who maintains he may be killed upon his return to Nicaragua because he is gay. The direct parallels may be oblique, but the contrast is nonetheless disheartening to those who imagine Canada as a haven for the threatened and a monument to fairness.

For Seifert and those like him, Canada's intricate appellate process is a virtual amnesty, while potentially legitimate refugee claimants are given no such recourse. The most glaring historic case involved the 937 souls on the SS St. Louis who, denied entry to Canada, the United States and Cuba in 1939, were returned to Hitler's Europe, where many of them perished in the Holocaust, having seen, but been rebuffed by, our saving shores.

As if in a final act of callous assault on Canada's judicial process and human decency, among the claims made in Seifert's appeal is the assertion that former justice minister Cotler's noted role as a Jewish human rights activist created a reasonable concern that his decision in the Seifert case was based on bias. Though this ugly allegation cannot come close to the atrocities in Seifert's past, it does nothing to assure us that his decades in Canada have enhanced his character.

May justice, however delayed, finally prevail for Michael Seifert's victims.

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