[2] It replaced earlier 1987 legislation targeting Nazi war criminals passed in the immediate wake of the Deschênes Commission.
It refers to acts like murder, sexual violence, or forcibly transferring children with the specific intent to destroy, either wholly or partially, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
This crime involves prohibited acts carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population.
[4] Crime against humanity refers to actions like murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, and persecution against civilians or identifiable groups.
[6] On 19 October 2005, Désiré Munyaneza, a Rwandan immigrant living in Toronto, became the first person arrested and charged with an offence under the CAHWCA.
[12] On 18 December 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada denied his motion for leave to appeal, thus definitively cementing the guilty verdict.
[14] The Royal Canadian Mounted Police alleged that he committed this act in the western Rwandan city of Kibuye, and that his case is connected to that of Munyaneza.