The Canadian media have been raising questions regarding the lengthy refuge granted to Laszlo Csatary, the Hungarian war criminal who recently was identified and arrested due to the efforts of my Simon Wiesenthal Centre colleague, Dr. Efraim Zuroff.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is similarly concerned with another case, playing out in an Ottawa court. On Oct. 3, 1980, a motorbike bomb exploded outside the Copernic Synagogue in Paris. Had it exploded half an hour later, it would have resulted in a massacre as worshippers exited the main door. As it was, there were four fatalities in the street and 42 wounded inside the synagogue.
Visiting Israeli filmmaker Aliza Shagrir — wife of television producer Micha Shagrir — was in Paris to dine with her journalist friend, Tamar Golan, who resided around the corner from Copernic. Setting out to buy some figs for that dinner, I walked with her and turned in one direction, as she turned the other way onto rue Copernic, to the grocer facing the synagogue, where she met her death.
The suspect in the case is Hassan Diab — a Lebanese-Canadian dual citizen who has been living in Canada for years, most recently as a sociology lecturer at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. He allegedly committed the bombing as an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Since being arrested in 2008, 28 years after the attack, he has been facing an extradition request from the French government. Last year, a Canadian judge agreed to the French request, but Diab is now appealing the decision.
In 2010, in Ottawa to participate in an inter-parliamentary conference on anti-Semitism at the Canadian legislature, I walked the six blocks to room 34 of the Ottawa Federal Tribunal, to hear part of his extradition proceedings. Amid girls in hijab veils and pro-Palestinian militants, I went through the rigorous security. Once seated, I was amazed at the filibuster-style discourse of the defense counsel, dissecting the multiple English interpretations of the French subjunctive (would, could, may, might) in the extradition documents.
There followed ad hominem attacks on their author, investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic, and on the legal system of France, “a foreign state that comes to Canada to deny its citizens their liberty.” Most Canadian extradition hearings reportedly take a few days. The Diab case will soon enter its third year.
More than a year ago, I argued in the French Catholic daily La Croix that Canada is bound by its extradition treaty with France — a fellow democracy and NATO ally. Instead, the full Copernic trial scheduled for Paris has, in effect, been playing out in Ottawa. Meanwhile, Diab’s advocates have tried to spin the case with a “Justice for Hassan Diab” campaign,
In an open appeal to the Canadian justice system, the Wiesenthal Centre instead has urged that “the proceedings focus on the extradition and not become a tribunal on the Palestine-Israel conflict. It concerns terrorism and all its victims — Jewish, Muslim and any indiscriminate targets”.
France demands Diab’s extradition to bring closure to the Copernic wounded, and to the victims’ families, who have been denied justice for 32 years. Their hopes are being betrayed by an unreasonably long extradition procedure, the trashing of the French dossier and the iconization of the suspect for a political cause.
If Diab were to demonstrate his innocence in Paris, the French court is competent to guarantee his rights and would acquit him.
But first, he must go to France. Will Canadian justice leave the Paris victims waiting for another 32 years before justice is served?
