Justice

A ninety-one-year-old Ukrainian American with leukaemia has been sentenced to five years in prison as an accessory to murder at Sobibór during the Holocaust. John Demjanjuk is the lowest-ranking person ever to have been tried for war crimes in Germany; an expert witness described him as "the littlest of the little fishes", and the prosecution's case rested on nothing more than his presence at the camp and, apparently, the fact that his crimes lacked sufficient magnitude to permit his recruitment into the CIA. "Justice must be done and be seen to be done, the sentence is almost irrelevant," said one survivor whose family was wiped out at Sobibór. Demjanjuk has, in fact, already been five years on death row in Israel because of a case of mistaken identity; it is far from clear whether the demands of justice would be served by counting this as time served and letting him die at home.