A Few Good Extraditions

A brief check-in on the slowly-but-surely turning wheels of post-genocide justice:

In another round of "well if you won't, we will," the world renowned, universal jurisdiction-lovin' Spanish judicial system indicted a Michigan resident on charges of accessory to genocide. Judge Ismael Moreno issued an arrest warrant for Johann Leprich, who is believed to have worked as a guard at the Nazi's Mauthausen concentration camp.

Leprich was stripped of his American citizenship in 1987 when his Nazi past was revealed, and he eluded arrest and deportation for another 16 years. Once caught, though, he was released back into the wilds of the Detroit suburbs (albeit, with an ankle bracelet) when no other country would take him, due to a US Supreme Court ruling placing a six month limit on detention for those awaiting deportation.

I can only hope that someone is working to close the legal loophole with an "except if you're an accused war criminal" clause -- but in the meantime, it looks like the Spaniards have our backs.

Elsewhere in the world...

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) did something responsible for a change, and handed over a man accused of overseeing the massacre of 2,000 Tutsis during Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Gregoire Ndahimana, who was the mayor of the town of Kivumu at the time, will stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), for, among other gruesome deeds, allegedly ordering the bulldozing of a church were Tutsi civilians were hiding.

Ndahimana spent the last 15 years hiding very close to home; he was captured last month in North Kivu province in the DRC, during a military operation against the FDLR militia, which grew from and still includes remnant's of Rwanda's genocidal militia. (So he essentially went from wrecking one country to doing the best he could to wreck another.)

Meanwhile, a fellow Rwandan fugitive is mounting his seventh appeal to fight extradition from Canada.

[Photo by Cpl Donald R. Ornitz, US Army, from Wikimedia Commons: Liberated prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria, give rousing welcome to Cavalrymen of the 11th Armored Division. The banner across the wall was made by Spanish Loyalist prisoners. It says "The Spanish Antifascists greet the Liberating Forces". The text is written in English and Russian as well.]