Ottawa pays $1.7-million in failed war-crimes cases

Canadian taxpayers have picked up $1.77-million in legal bills incurred by three men who fought court battles after Ottawa accused them of being war criminals.

In the separate court cases, the federal government sought to kick the Eastern European immigrants out of the country. The common allegation was that they collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and then lied about their backgrounds to become Canadian citizens.

In each case, a Federal Court judge ruled against the government. Prosecutors were found to lack evidence that the men were war criminals. The judges also ruled that postwar immigration systems didn't ask the kinds of questions that would cause the men to cover up their pasts.

The legal costs are another blow for the federal government's efforts to deal with war criminals, which have cost tens of millions of dollars but resulted in only a handful of suspects being ordered deported out of dozens of still-active files from the Second World War. Even when the government and courts agree on stripping citizenship or deportations, such individuals are about as likely to die in Canada of old age as to actually be kicked out.

"What it seems to be designed to do is harass, but not remove," said B.C. immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who obtained the Citizenship and Immigration Canada records of legal costs.

The three Federal Court decisions were handed down in 1998 and 1999. Ottawa ended up paying more than half a million dollars in legal costs for each of the men it accused, according to the documents.

The cases are:

Johann Dueck of St. Catharines, Ont. His lawyers were paid $750,000 by taxpayers. Ottawa tried to send him back to Ukraine, alleging he was a police officer who rounded up civilians and soldiers for execution -- but a judge ruled the government lacked proof that he was a war criminal or even a member of the police force.

Eduards Podins. His lawyers were paid $510,000 by Ottawa. The Burnaby, B.C., resident was alleged to have worked as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in Latvia. A judge ruled Mr. Podins was merely a shopkeeper and the facility was a standard prison camp.

Peteris (Peter) Arvids Vitols, also of St. Catharines. His lawyers were paid $505,000. Ottawa sought to deport him, alleging he was a member of the Latvian Waffen SS. A Federal Court judge ruled that he did not take part in any atrocities.

These amounts don't include what the federal government paid its own legal teams and investigators in the failed prosecutions. The rulings coincided with a time when Ottawa announced it would spend nearly $50-million over three years in an effort to hunt and deport war criminals, especially lingering Nazis.

Earlier this year, the government said it still has 82 active Second World War files that war-crimes officials are investigating.

"These cases are difficult and expensive undertakings," said Terry Beitner, director and general counsel of the Department of Justice's war-crimes unit. Nevertheless, such cases send out the signal that Canada will not be a haven for war criminals, he said.

Since 1995, the Federal Court has ruled on nine cases involving alleged Nazi war criminals. The government won six of them, but two of the men died before they were deported, Mr. Beitner said. Four others remain in Canada in other stages of the multilayered and complex deportation process.

Jack Silverstone, counsel for the Canadian Jewish Congress, said in an interview that war-crimes officials don't bring frivolous cases to court. He also said it has been about a decade since Canada actually forcibly deported a Nazi war criminal.

In recent years, Canada's war-crimes program has focused more on "contemporary" war criminals, from places such as Rwanda or Yugoslavia. It now touts its successes in terms of preventing hundreds of alleged war criminals from entering Canada in the first place, rather than the trickier business of kicking a few individuals out decades after they've arrived.

Lawyers for the three men whom the government accused of collaborating with the Nazis racked up huge legal bills during the court battles involving allegations dating back half a century.

These three cases stand out as the largest bills on the Citizenship and Immigration Canada list of about 60 payouts to other lawyers incurred during fiscal 1999.

Most such costs ran only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars at a time, and the most expensive item after the three failed war-criminal prosecutions was $10,000.

In 1995, after the government determined that a Supreme Court ruling made prosecuting war crimes under the Criminal Code "impractical," it adopted a policy of trying to strip alleged war criminals of their citizenship and to deport them.