‘Ivan the Terrible’ —The trial of John Demjanuk
Instructive lessons on the difficulties of effectively prosecuting war criminals arising from the application of strict rules on due process and evidence in national legal systems based upon the respect for the rule of law can be learnt from the recent case of John Demjanuk. Demjanuk was accused of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a name given by victims to a sadistic operator of gas chambers who assisted in murdering thousands of Jews at the Treblinka death camp set up by Nazi Germany in Poland during the Second World War. In 1977 proceedings were commenced against Demjanuk in the United States to deprive him of the US citizenship he had allegedly gained on the basis of lies concerning his wartime activities on his visa application. After Israel had requested his extradition under a treaty with the United States, while deportation proceedings were still pending, in 1983 Demjanuk was finally extradited to stand trial in Israel in 1986. In 1988 he was sentenced to death by hanging by the District Court of Jerusalem. Damjanuk appealed against the decision on the grounds that, as he had stated from the beginning, he was a victim of mistaken identity. He remained in solitary confinement in a cell near Tel Aviv for five years until his appeal was decided. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, in 1991 new evidence emerged from Soviet archives identifying another man named Ivan Marchenko as ‘Ivan the Terrible’. In 1993 the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted Demjanuk of all charges, although it found that Demjanuk had served as an SS guardsman in the Trawniki unit, participating in the killings of thousands of Jews, and that he had also been active at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. A group of survivors of the Holocaust petitioned the Court to institute new criminal proceedings against Demjanuk on the basis of the evidence concerning Trawniki and Sobibor. However, the decision not to bring new charges against Demjanuk was in the end upheld. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit then reopened Demjanuk’s extradition case and permitted him to return to the United States. In 1993 the Court found that there had been procedural misconduct during the extradition hearings and that exculpatory evidence had been withheld by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. It revoked the extradition order. In 1994 the US Supreme Court denied review of this decision and Demjanuk returned to free life in Ohio. Thus, an expensive and time-consuming process occupying more than seventeen years, involving two friendly countries both known to be seriously disposed to prosecute Nazi war criminals, in the end led to no conviction.

Malanczuk, Peter. Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law.
London, GBR: Routledge, 1997. p 116.