Madam Speaker, I am pleased today to be able to speak to Bill C-19, an act respecting genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and to implement the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
The Progressive Conservative Party supports and applauds this excellent initiative by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The purpose of Bill C-19 is to implement Canada's obligations under the Rome Statute, which was adopted on July 17, 1998 by the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court.
As has been previously mentioned, this piece of legislation forces us to examine some very disturbing matters throughout the world and oftentimes within our own borders.
Once the ICC has been set up it will be the first permanent international court empowered to investigate the most serious of crimes under international law. These include genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. We can all be assured that although Canada is showing great leadership by making sure that war criminals will be prosecuted and punished for their awful crimes against humanity during a war, there is more that we can and must do. The legislation lays the groundwork to empower those officials within our borders to do just that.
Too many lives have been taken. It is time for the international community to work together to ensure that something is done to provoke positive change in this area to bring about greater accountability and to bring to justice those individuals who have performed and partaken in these atrocities.
Canada's leadership throughout the century has been one for which we can all be proud. With Bill C-19 we have an opportunity to do more. Canada is one of many countries taking steps to implement statutes within a framework of national and international systems of law.
Although six states have already ratified the statute, Fiji, Italy, San Marino, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, in light of the legislative initiatives brought forward by the federal government last December 10, the Conservative Party is glad to say that Canada is one of the first countries to take overall comprehensive legislative steps to implement the Statute of Rome.
I again congratulate the minister for his efforts and his leadership in pursuit of justice for war criminals, and certainly on behalf of victims.
According to justice department statistics, there are presently 400 people living within the boundaries of Canada who have allegedly been involved in the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. It is simply unacceptable that many war criminals are able to live out their quiet lives here as if nothing had happened, as if nothing they had done was wrong and escape prosecution for terrible atrocities.
Most of these individuals in question hail from the Balkans, Africa and Central or South America. Canada must not ever become or be seen to be a safe haven for war criminals. In response to this problem, Bill C-19 is a great achievement.
Sadly Canadians and the world will have to wait until the international community gets together to implement a permanent institution that can have genuine and necessary judicial capacity to fulfill the mission to address the problem.
In the meantime we have witnessed the carnage in Kosovo, in Rwanda and in other countries around the world, which makes this legislation all the more important and all the more timely.
Basically Bill C-19 would implement the Rome Statute and replace the current provisions in the criminal code with respect to war crimes. It creates two kinds of offences: offences within Canada and offences outside our borders. Offences within Canada are encompassed in clause 4 of the bill. Pursuant to clause 4, every person is guilty of an indictable offence who commits, in Canada, genocide, a crime against humanity or war crimes.
These definitions provided for the three offences are based on those found in sections 6, 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute. This is in addition to the criminal code where a person, if convicted of one of these offences, shall be sentenced to life imprisonment if the crime was committed intentionally. Obviously there is the burden of proof on the crown. In any other case, a person is liable to life imprisonment, a very serious and appropriate response.
These provisions would apply to conduct committed in Canada and permit Canada to either prosecute these offences or extradite individuals to the country where the atrocities occurred and face prosecution in those lands.
This is a great addition since it was extremely difficult for the justice department in the past to prosecute war criminals who had taken refuge here as a result of the supreme court ruling, the now very infamous and famous ruling of R v Finta. In that decision, many will recall that Imre Finta, who was legally trained as a captain in the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie was in command of an investigative unit at Szeged during the second world war.
It is documented that during that time over 8,000 Jewish people were detained in a brickyard, forcibly stripped of their valuables and deported to horrendous, dreadful conditions in a concentration camp as part of the Nazi final solution. This order for execution, the final solution, was on the gendarmerie and certain police forces to carry out.
After the war Mr. Finta fled to Canada. In the early 1990s the Canadian courts challenged the respondent under the Canadian Criminal Code war crime provisions with unlawful confinement, robbery, kidnapping and manslaughter of the victims at that horrible death camp.
In his client's defence, Mr. Finta's lawyer argued correctly that the defence of obedience to superior orders and the peace officer's defence were available under the criminal code, which was the case for members of the military or police forces in prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
These defences are weighed by the courts, subject to the manifest illegality test. This test basically refers to defences that are not available when the orders in question are manifestly unlawful. The burden of proof here relies very much on the qualification of the unlawful act.