The Federal Court of Appeal decision to reverse cabinet's revocation of Helmut Oberlander's citizenship - and by a unanimous decision to boot - is a judicial vindication of the position the Ukrainian Canadian community has taken all along.

The Ukrainian community never set out to defend "Nazi war criminals", or even "alleged Nazi war criminals" for that matter, since to be any kind of "alleged" criminal, one first has to be charged with a crime, which none of these individuals were.

The Ukrainian community has consistently maintained that this process was an assault on the civil liberties of individuals because they were not being charged with any crime. The whole process was also a back-door attempt to brand these individual as "war criminals" without even having to prove that they committed any crime whatsoever. That's what made it so despicable - and that's what the Federal Court of Appeal is telling the federal government.

"The Governor in Council is not, of course, deciding as a matter of law whether a person is a war criminal, but it cannot apply the war criminals policy to a person unless it first satisfies itself, to use the very words of the policy, that 'there is evidence of direct involvement in or complicity of war crimes or crimes against humanity'," reads the ruling.

"The (Immigration) Minister's Report does refer to the 'no safe haven' policy but does not analyse why it is that Mr. Oberlander fits within the policy which, the Report fails to mention, applies only to suspected war criminals," the ruling adds.

"In face of the express finding by Mr. Justice MacKay that no evidence was presented about any personal involvement of Mr. Oberlander in war crimes, one would expect the Governor in Council to at least explain why, in its view, a policy which, by its very - and underlined - words applied only to suspected war criminals, applied to someone who served only as an interpreter in the German army. I note that neither the Minister in her report nor the reviewing Judge even refer to the fact that Mr. Oberlander had asserted that he had not joined the German army voluntarily and that Mr. Justice MacKay has not made a definite finding as to whether Mr. Oberlander had been conscripted or not."

In other words the government must adhere to its own guidelines set out when the policy was first announced in 1995, namely: "The key criterion in all these proceedings is the existence of some evidence of individual criminality. If that cannot be proven, no proceedings will be considered."

But the bureaucrats at the War Crimes Division who ran these witch hunts chose to ignore these guidelines, since all they were required to do under existing citizenship legislation was to prove that a person "probably", and we stress the word "probably", lied upon coming to Canada, even though all documents relating to that period have been destroyed.

When they did attempt to introduce "evidence" against these people, this "evidence" consisted of statements obtained by the KGB through torture. No wonder judges in three D & D cases threw them out.

Despite the government's vehement denials that any particular group from any particular region has been targeted in D & D proceedings, all the respondents in D & D cases initiated since 1995 (including ethnic Germans) have originally come from East Central Europe or the former Soviet Union (FSU) - the vast majority from the FSU. That's because upon announcing the launch of the D&D policy in a January 1995 news release, the government stated that a major step forward in its investigations was an agreement that gave it access to KGB files.

We are glad the courts have finally rejected this process for the very reason that it deserved to be rejected - namely that there is no evidence of any war crimes committee by the people who were victimized by the process.

Now the challenge is to change the Citizenship Act so that such abuse of civil liberties will not be allowed in the future