Slovakia files charges against accused Nazi arrested in Hungary
Dan Taglioli |
[JURIST] Slovakian authorities on Thursday announced that they have filed new
charges against a 97-year-old Hungarian man arrested in Budapest
earlier this month on allegations of abusing and helping
deport thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. The charges
concern facilitating the deportation of Jews to Germany,
and the case in Slovakia means that extradition proceedings
may now be launched in Hungary. Earlier this week Slovak
Justice Minister Tomas Borec [official profile, in Slovak]
asked a court to seek from Hungary the extradition of the
man alleged to be Laszlo Csatary [JURIST report]. The Hungarian
man was arrested after the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC)
[advocacy website], a Jewish human rights organization committed
to finding and prosecuting Holocaust war criminals, submitted
new evidence [JURIST report] to the Budapest prosecutor's
office detailing the war crimes allegedly committed by Ladislaus
Csizsik-Csatary, a former senior Hungarian police officer
in the Slovakian city of Kosice. The evidence submitted to Prosecutor Dr. Gabor Hetenyi alleged that Csatary was one of the
main actors responsible for deporting 300 Jews from Kosice
to Kamenetz-Podolsk in Ukraine, where they were killed in
1941. The SWC also accused Csatary of being responsible for
transferring about 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz [JURIST news
archive]. According to a Czechoslovak court ruling from June
8, 1948, Csatary was found guilty of deportations to Nazi
death camps and of unlawfully whipping, torturing or killing
people in 1944, and he was sentenced to death in absentia.
Czechoslovakia abolished the death penalty three years before
dividing into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, so the death
sentence would likely be changed to life imprisonment if
Csatary is extradited from Hungary.
Earlier this month Hungarian prosecutors charged Csatary [JURIST report] with
the "unlawful torture of human beings," a war crime that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Csatary is at
the top of the SWC's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals
[BBC backgrounder], and the SWC had already called on the
Hungarian government to prosecute the Nazi war criminal [JURIST
report] when the center issued its annual report in April.
Nazi prosecution continues regardless of the ages of the
criminals. In January the Ingolstadt Prosecutor's Office
[official website, in German] filed a motion [JURIST report]
to jail Klaas Faber, a Dutch native who fled to Germany after
being convicted in the Netherlands in 1947 of Nazi war crimes.
Germany reopened investigations into former Nazi death camp
guards in October, which stemmed from the conviction of John
Demjanjuk [JURIST reports], a former guard at a camp in Poland
who was deported to Germany to stand trial for his alleged
Nazi crimes. Last September alleged Nazi Sandor Kepiro died
while he awaited an appeal [JURIST report] on his acquittal
on war crimes charges. jurist.org
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