Canadians key players at Hague tribunal
Lawyers from Victoria and
Toronto among many taking major roles in Milosevic's trial
PAUL
KNOX
Eight years ago, secure in his post as president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic could hardly have believed that one day he would sit in a prisoner's dock and hear himself accused of crimes against humanity. Nor could he foresee that the long legal process bringing him to court in The Hague would be studded with Canadians in key roles. Call it a peculiar vocation for international criminal law. Call it mere coincidence. For whatever reason, a remarkable number of Canadians have been closely involved with Mr. Milosevic's case. Most prominent in the days since the former president's July 3 court appearance have been Dirk Ryneveld, the Victoria prosecutor leading the legal assault against him, and Christopher Black, the Toronto lawyer helping him counterattack. But they're just the tip of the iceberg. A Canadian -- Madam Justice Louise Arbour -- supervised the preparation of the 1999 indictment against Mr. Milosevic. She was then chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). James Stewart, a Toronto lawyer on leave from the Ontario Attorney-General's office, helped assemble the prosecution's legal team. Stéphane Bourgon, a former Canadian Forces military lawyer, is chief of staff for ICTY president Claude Jorda of France. And if Mr. Milosevic's case reaches the appeal stage, he could well find yet another Canadian arguing the case for the prosecution. In all, 60 Canadians are serving among the ICTY's 1,120 staff members, including lawyers, police investigators and support staff. "They're all fine people," said William Schabas, a Canadian expert on international criminal law who teaches at the National University of Ireland in Galway. "They do us proud being there." Canadians have also been prominent in a parallel criminal tribunal for Rwanda, and in efforts to set up an International Criminal Court. Philippe Kirsch, former chief legal adviser to Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, chaired negotiations that led to the ICC's approval in 1998. "Canadians have a particularly well-developed sense of justice . . . ," Mr. Ryneveld said. "For a country with a very small population, we're at the cutting edge of developments in this area." The Canadian thread in the pursuit of Mr. Milosevic began in 1992, when the United Nations set up a commission to investigate atrocities in the former Yugoslav republics. A key member was Bill Fenrick, then a Canadian Forces expert in the law of war and now senior legal adviser at the ICTY. At the time, there was talk of punishing the perpetrators of so-called ethnic cleansing and the leaders who ordered it. But the commission on which Mr. Fenrick served was starved for funds, and posed a slim threat to major players. The rebellion in the Serbian province of Kosovo that led Mr. Milosevic to send in troops in 1998 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombardment of Serbia the following year were far in the future. Mr. Fenrick was skeptical in those early days about the chances of linking powerful figures to atrocities and bringing them to trial. "I wouldn't have been surprised at the idea of there being an indictment of Milosevic, but I would have been surprised at seeing a trial, yes," he said from The Hague. Mr. Fenrick joined the ICTY staff after the UN Security Council established it in 1993 as the first war-crimes court since Nuremberg. One of its 11 judges was Jules Deschênes, formerly of the Quebec Superior Court, who headed a royal commission on war criminals during the 1980s. He resigned from the ICTY in 1997 because of poor health and died last year. Judge Arbour left the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1996 and took over as the ICTY's chief prosecutor. By the end of her three-year term, there were more than 60 public indictments and an unknown number of secret ones. The most famous was the May, 1999, indictment of Mr. Milosevic, who was then president of Yugoslavia. He was accused of committing crimes against humanity and breaking the laws of war in connection with mass deportations and killings of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, and was handed over to the tribunal last month. The senior trial attorney on the case is Mr. Ryneveld, a long-time B.C. prosecutor who handled an inquest into a 1978 air disaster in Cranbrook that killed 42 people. His team works under Mr. Stewart, the ICTY's chief of prosecutions, who as an Ontario Crown attorney worked on the early stages of the Paul Bernardo sex-slaying trial. Also at the ICTY is Norman Farrell, a former Ontario prosecutor and lawyer for the International Committee of the Red Cross. As the longest-serving member of the tribunal's appeals section, he's a logical choice to handle arguments if the Milosevic case gats that far. And the ranks of Canadians could swell even further. Sharon Williams, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, was named last month as one of 27 judges on call to clear up a backlog of cases at the ICTY and handle an expected increase. And Marlys Edwardh, a Toronto trial lawyer, was interviewed this month for a prosecutor's job. Canadians say that taking part in the ground-breaking ICTY was too good an opportunity to pass up. Mr. Stewart, 54, had appeared before Judge Arbour in Ontario and said it was her appointment as chief prosecutor for both the ICTY and the Rwanda tribunals that triggered his interest. "She had a gap that needed to be filled, and I was able to supply that need," he said. Dutch-born Mr. Ryneveld, 55, said the mixture of elements from British, continental European and military law practised at the tribunal can be confusing. "Whatever you learned back home you park at the door," he said. "You have to re-educate yourself." The largest leap may be from domestic criminal law to the law of war, which bars the deliberate targeting of civilians but allows "collateral damage" if the tactics used are appropriate for the military objective in sight. "In normal criminal-law situations, killing is absolutely wrong," Mr. Farrell said. "In wartime situations, killing is not [necessarily] wrong. . . . It's difficult to get your head around this concept of proportionality." |
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