In 1989, the Canadian Department of Justice asked me to serve as its legal expert in R. v. Finta, Canada's first prosecution of crimes against humanity under a 1987 statute incorporating this international crime into Canadian criminal law. In this capacity I worked with the prosecution team for several months, prepared extensive memoranda of law, and testified before the trial court for four full, grueling days. It was one of my life's most gratifying and worthwhile experiences, one that I will never forget.

The Canadian statute, which is retrospective but not retroactive, (sic) requires inter alia that crimes against humanity be established under international law at the time that the alleged crime was committed, and that the specific crime charged under it also constitute a violation of Canadian criminal law at the time that the alleged criminal conduct occurred. These two requirements make it very difficult for the prosecution to succeed. This case was the only one brought under that law, and it revealed the difficulties in its application.

This first and last case involved a former Hungarian Gendarmerie Captain, Imre Finta, then a naturalized Canadian citizen, who was charged, inter alia, with the deportation of 8,617 Jews from Szeged, Hungary, to Auschwitz, Poland, and Strasshof, Austria, in June 1944 as part of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. No one knows how many of these deportees died in transit, in the death camps, or under slave-labor conditions.