East European Groups in U.S. Praise Canadian Plan to Permit Trials of Suspected War Criminals

East European ethnic groups in the United States on Friday applauded a finding by a Canadian government commission that Canada should amend its criminal laws to permit trials of suspected Nazi war criminals in Canada, rather than deporting them to the Soviet Union or other countries for trial.

Representatives of the groups said the Canadian decision, announced Thursday, strengthened their argument that the United States should make similar changes in its own laws to ensure that former refugees accused of war crimes receive the full benefit of American justice.

The report by Canada’s Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals was announced after a two-year inquiry into charges by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and other Jewish groups that thousands of Nazi collaborators had been allowed to emigrate to Canada after World War II. The inquiry concluded that these charges had been “grossly exaggerated” but that strong evidence of war crimes existed in 20 cases and more ambiguous evidence in about 200 others.

‘Political Courage’

Justice Minister Ray Hnatyshyn said the Canadian government would not rule out deporting suspected war criminals in some cases, but he said Canada’s underlying philosophy “is to say that we will not in fact just export our problems but will deal with them here, on the basis of political courage and political resolve.”

“This is magnificent,” said Rasa Razgaitis of Americans for Due Process, an organization that has strongly criticized the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations.

“It means these people (in Canada) will be tried for what they are accused of, which is not the case in the United States,” she said. Ojars Kalnins of the American Latvian Assn. also welcomed the decision and noted that “it’s what we’ve been asking for here.”

Non-Jury Proceedings

Under current U.S. law, accused Nazi collaborators are tried in civil, non-jury proceedings to determine whether they failed to report wartime activities that would have disqualified them from entering the United States after World War II.

In practice, the Soviet Union has been one of the few countries willing to accept former refugees who have been stripped of their U.S. citizenship and deported on suspicion of war crimes. Israel’s current trial of retired Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk is only the second war crimes proceeding that Israel has held in the last 25 years.

Last week, six East European groups met with Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III to appeal for war crimes trials in the United States. The groups are also seeking to block the deportation of Karl Linnas, 67, a retired land surveyor accused of running a Nazi concentration camp in his native Estonia, which the Soviet Union annexed during World War II.

A Soviet court sentenced Linnas to death in absentia in 1962, but the verdict was inadvertently announced in a Soviet legal journal three weeks before the trial took place--a blunder his defenders cite as evidence the trial was a sham.

Alternative Country

Meese disclosed last week that he has given Linnas’ attorney, former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, until Sunday to find an alternative country to accept Linnas, who will otherwise become the first person the United States has ever deported to the Soviet Union to face a pending death sentence.

Danuta Mazeika of the California-based Coalition for Constitutional Justice and Security, representing about 90 conservative and East European ethnic groups, said current U.S. law requires that “either we deport these people to the (Soviet) gulag or to the sunny shores of Portugal. Either way, real justice is not being done. They should be tried here” in criminal proceedings.

Mari-Ann Rikken of the Estonian American National Council noted that Canada’s decision conformed to the British government’s position on suspected war criminals.