Did NATO "trespass" by bombing in Bosnia?

The Canadian legal system can certainly entertain ludicrous arguments:

The war in Bosnia stands among the dirtiest of modern conflicts, featuring torture, mass rape and genocide fuelled by ethnic rage that was hardly eased by the United Nations entering the fray. Against this backdrop, the ugly point of contact between two Canadians on that foreign battlefield highlights a divisiveness that still reverberates, with a new chapter set to open Monday in a Toronto courtroom.

Nicholas Ribic left Edmonton to join Serb forces and "fight Muslims." Canadian Forces Captain Patrick Rechner, from Digby, N. S., was assigned to the UN as a peacekeeper.

On May 26, 1995, Ribic kidnapped Capt. Rechner at gunpoint, shackling him to a lightning rod beside an ammunition bunker as a human shield to stop NATO bombers.

Pictures of the bespectacled Capt. Rechner, his hair tousled and face distressed, became an iconic image of the conflict.

That he faced this treatment at the hands of a fellow Canadian has led some to call Ribic Canada's John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban fighter captured in Afghanistan. Federal prosecutor Robin Parker calls Ribic a "war tourist."

On Monday, an apparently unrepentant Ribic will defend his actions -- claiming the NATO bombing was the crime, not his kidnapping.

Ribic's trial in Ottawa in 2005, which found him guilty of hostage-taking and threatening death, is called "one of the most unusual criminal trials in Canadian history" by D'Arcy DePoe, Ribic's lawyer. It was the first time a Canadian was charged for such a crime taking place abroad.

This appeal is equally confounding.

In it, Ribic characterizes the NATO bombing as an assault and an act of trespassing and points to the legal defence of justification: The Criminal Code allows someone to apply reasonable force to prevent an assault or eject a trespasser.

"While this is an unusual form of trespass, it is submitted that NATO dropping 2,000-pound bombs on this property was clearly a trespass," Mr. DePoe argues.

Despite that position, Ribic does not truly want to reduce the vast geo-political events in Bosnia in 1995 to the level of a common criminal charge. He is putting the politics of the war itself on trial.

"When Canadian criminal charges are laid in the context of a foreign civil war, the case may involve considerations of local and international politics as much as crime," Mr. De-Poe argues. The government wanted to make a statement by laying the charges and now Ribic has a chance to make a statement of his own...

It's hard to see how the NATO bombing can be put "on trial"; it was carried out pursuant to a UN Security Council resolution. One certainly hopes nonsense such as this does not happen:

If the argument gains traction with the Ontario Court of Appeal judges, it could set a striking precedent for activists and militants...