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The Munyaneza Trial Shows Canada Is No Safe Haven for War Criminals

By Erna Paris
Globe and Mail, November 3, 2009

It was a historic day for Canada, and one with an international echo. Last Thursday, a Canadian judge sentenced Désiré Munyaneza, a Rwandan who had failed to obtain refugee status in Canada, to 25 years without parole for his participation in the 1994 genocide. In just 100 days, about 800,000 Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu countrymen.

Mr. Munyaneza's trial took two years and heard from 66 witnesses, many of them survivors now living in Canada. Their testimony was frequently emotional: One woman spoke of having been raped five times by Mr. Munyaneza, of seeing him beat to death children tied inside sacks.

Within the recounting of such horrors, two telling items emerged: The first was that, 15 years after the genocide, the witnesses still needed to have their identities protected. The second was the comment by Mr. Justice André Denis of the Quebec Superior Court: "History has shown that what happened there can happen anywhere in the world and that nobody is immune to such a tragedy." Mr. Munyaneza, he noted, was an educated man from a prominent family.

Mr. Munyaneza is the first person to be tried under Canada's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, a piece of legislation enacted in 2000 that redirected our sorry record on this file. In the 1980s, the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada compiled a list of 774 suspected Holocaust-era criminals, but lack of access to overseas evidence whittled possible prosecutions down to 20. In the end, only four were charged; of these, one was acquitted, two cases were dropped because of inaccessible evidence, and one was stayed due to the defendant's poor health. Canada was known to be a safe haven for Nazis.

Well, we may have sheltered more criminals than other countries, but there was little redress for their victims anywhere. This began to change at the end of the Cold War when the United Nations created international tribunals to hold perpetrators from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia accountable, and then with the creation of the International Criminal Court, in which Canada played a seminal role. The Rome Statute of the ICC holds that national courts around the world must try war crimes cases that fall within their jurisdiction, leaving only the highest-level perpetrators to be judged at the tribunal itself; but, to do so, countries such as Canada needed to adapt their domestic legislation.

Canada was the first to incorporate the Rome Statute into its national law, making the groundbreaking arrest and trial of Mr. Munyaneza, a resident of Toronto, possible. (Had Rwanda had the infrastructure to hold an expeditious fair trial, Mr. Munyaneza could have been tried there. It did not.)

The Canadian Centre for International Justice, which battles impunity and assists victims of human-rights abuses, estimates that 1,500 alleged war criminals live amongst us, a figure confirmed by Ottawa. As happened in the Canadian Rwandan community, perpetrators and their victims often live in close proximity, creating extended trauma. (In the 1990s, I visited a Toronto apartment building where Bosnian Serb and Muslim refugees had been parked by Ottawa. People who had once tried to murder one another now threatened reprisals with graffiti in the stairwells.)

With so many suspected perpetrators of the world's worst crimes living in Canada and the proven usefulness of our new law, we need to see more prosecutions. Our international reputation for human rights has taken a beating in recent years through complicity with the rendition of Maher Arar and the Harper government's refusal to repatriate Omar Khadr. So it's encouraging to know that the implications of the Munyaneza trial will reverberate outside our borders.

The made-in-Canada legislation, the trial and the verdict signal yet another advance in the normalization of an emerging world order in which international law is becoming an increasingly useful tool for seeking accountability and confronting criminal impunity, a tool for bringing justice to the victims of the world's worst crimes.

The case of Désiré Munyaneza will stand as a deterrent to those who may be contemplating war crimes elsewhere in the world. Of this we may be justly proud.