A Case to Answer: The Story of Australia's First European War Crimes Prosecution

by David Bevan

On Australia Day 1990, a seventy-three-year-old man was plucked from the Adelaide suburbs and accused of helping massacre nearly nine hundred men, women and children in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

The trial of Ivan Polyukhovich stretched across the world as witnesses gathered to testify from Ukraine, Israel and North America. Australian investigators, lawyers, magistrates and judges had to deal with memories half a century old, and the customs and language of an isolated Soviet village that knew nothing of western criminal justice.

A Case to Answer is compelling courtroom drama. David Bevan describes the events that led to Polyukhovich's arrest, his near fatal shooting, and the extraordinary manoeuvrings as Australia's legal system is tested to the limit.

264 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1994