Current federal legislation is insufficient to prosecute war criminals in the United States, and a notorious American Nazi hunter tasked by the Justice Department with investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine was blown up on Wednesday.
• Also read: A figure from America’s far right charged with “incitement”.
• Also read: Hillary Clinton compares Trump supporters to Nazis
These don’t apply to the “vast majority” of war criminals who come to the United States, unless their victims or those responsible for those abuses are Americans, criticized Eli Rosenbaum, who has worked for the Justice Department for 36 years hearing in Congress on the subject.
“Given the heinous crimes committed by Russia during its unjust war in Ukraine, this hearing comes at the most appropriate, urgent and chilling time,” said the 67-year-old expert, who has spent much of his career prosecuting Nazi war criminals.
Federal law does not allow assisting Americans who are being tortured abroad unless the perpetrator is an American himself or lives in the United States, Rosenbaum said.
There is also no law on “crimes against humanity,” which are often committed outside the context of war, such as slavery or mass murder, he added.
Eli Rosenbaum worked on a hundred cases that led to the deportation of former Nazis.
Among them is a former concentration camp guard who lived in Tennessee and was deported from the United States last year, 75 years after his crimes.
Mr. Rosenbaum has also prosecuted war criminals who committed human rights abuses in Bosnia, Guatemala and Rwanda.
“Having spent four decades tracking Nazis from World War II, I can attest to our great frustration with the limitations of the law, which made it impossible to track many of the Nazi criminals uncovered in the United States,” he noted .
“We could only prosecute them civilly. Russians and other war criminals who come here should not be able to evade criminal justice and find a safe haven here in the same way,” Rosenbaum said, adding that the Pentagon, the US State Department, Departments of Justice and Homeland Security had agreed on “technical solutions” to overcome these legal deficiencies.
UN investigators last week accused Moscow of committing a “significant number” of war crimes in four Ukrainian regions in the first few weeks after the Russian invasion.
On the other hand, they judged that contrary to the claims of NGOs and Ukraine, it is too early to speak of crimes against humanity.