MONTREAL - War criminals on the lam are sheltered from international justice by Canada's lumbering, ineffective legal system, charges a former intelligence analyst in the RCMP war crimes unit.
Canada has been a popular destination for those fleeing recent conflicts in the Balkans and Rwanda, but former intelligence officials and international lawyers question whether Ottawa has the resources to weed out those ducking prosecution.
"If I were working as a consultant for war criminals, what I would tell them is that Canada is probably the best place to go in terms of avoiding prosecution and in terms of avoiding deportation,'' Tom Quiggin, an ex-intelligence analyst for the war crimes units of both the RCMP and Citizenship and Immigration, told The Canadian Press.
Rwandan officials maintain that five accused ring leaders of the Rwandan genocide are at large in Canada. One of them, Leon Mugesera, is facing a deportation order. Rwanda has sent extradition requests and arrest warrants for him and the others.
Quiggin, who also served as an intelligence analyst for the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, says the number of suspected modern war criminals in Canada reaches well into the thousands.
According to a government report released earlier this year, the Justice Department and the RCMP were dealing with a total of 57 modern war crime files as of March 31, 2006.
"The whole point of the Canadian immigration system is to get people into the country,'' says Quiggin.
"It has very little focus on how do we get people out of the country when we suddenly discover we have a few bad apples in with the rest.''
In recent weeks, the RCMP has opened itself to accusations that its investigations of suspected war criminals are misguided.
On Aug. 17, Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board put an end to attempts to deport a 34-year-old government lawyer and Rwandan refugee.
The RCMP accused the man, whose name is protected by court order, of lying about his participation in the 1994 genocide.
But their efforts to have the man kicked out of the country were cut short when it was alleged federal officials withheld evidence that would clear the man.
Defence lawyer Lorne Waldman says the RCMP interviewed 15 witnesses in Rwanda while investigating a series of war crime cases in 2002.
While some of the statements clear his client, he said the RCMP only presented incriminating summaries of three interviews.
"Next to what I lived through (in) the genocide, this was excruciating,'' the refugee, an Ottawa resident, says about his fight to clear his name.
"What needs to be looked at is how the information about war criminals is collected, how it is analyzed internally and how it's used within the tribunals,'' he told The Canadian Press. "I think that is where the problem really is.''
Since 1998, Ottawa has made a concerted effort to change the perception that the country is soft on war criminals.
The government set aside $15.6 million that year to expand the scope of the War Crimes Program _ a joint force of RCMP, Citizenship and Immigration and Justice Department officials _ to include suspects from modern conflicts.
But funding for the program hasn't increased in a decade, leading some to criticize the government's commitment.
"It seems that there are very limited resources available for ensuring that war criminals do not end up in Canada or that if they are in Canada they are prosecuted,'' says Payam Akhavan, a McGill University law professor and former legal adviser to the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Quiggin says the RCMP has too few investigators assigned to the program while the Justice Department has too many lawyers for a relatively modest case load.
"There is a severe mismatch of resources,'' he says. "The number of investigators is quite limited, the number of cases is quite large and each case is quite complex because you have hundreds of witnesses literally scattered all over the planet.''
An RCMP spokesperson indicated there are as many as 11 officers assigned to its war crimes unit at any given time.
Among the problems that face government lawyers trying to deport suspected war criminals is getting evidence collected abroad admitted in Canadian courts.
Defence lawyers in the ongoing trial of Desire Munyaneza, a failed refugee claimant from Rwanda who is the first person to be tried under Canada's war crimes and crimes against humanity law, have argued some of the Crown's evidence does not meet Canadian standards of justice.
In Quiggin's opinion these standards are often unreasonably high.
"Our standards of evidence are geared in such a way that they can't accept information from other court systems or other investigation systems around the world,'' he says. "But most of the crimes that occur have in fact occurred overseas.''
Yet Quiggin stresses that the War Crimes Program has had its successes. He credits it with being able to significantly limit the number suspected war criminals who tried to enter Canada following the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.
This year's annual report of the War Crimes Program says since 1998, 3,360 people have been turned away because of past involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
The report adds that 408 suspects have been removed from Canada during that time.
Akhavan warns of the danger for Canada and the international community to give the impression war criminals can easily avoid justice.
"In order to change the cost-benefit calculus of using violence as an instrument of power, we need to ensure that perpetrators are held accountable.''
