Suspected war criminal escapes extradition from Australia on
legal technicality |
(JTA) -- Australia's highest court has ruled not to extradite suspected war
criminal Charles Zentai to his native Hungary.
Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff told JTA that Wednesday's ruling
not to extradite the alleged war criminal to Hungary is "a
permanent stain on Australia's record."
An Australian government spokesperson said on Wednesday that
Zentai, who is accused of murdering a Jew in Budapest in
1944, could not be extradited because back then "the
offense of 'war crime' did not exist under Hungarian law," The Australian reported.
Hungary first requested Zentai's extradition in 2005 for
the offense of war crimes. He is accused of fatally assaulting
Peter Balazs, 18, in November 1944, for not wearing a yellow
Star of David.
He and two fellow soldiers in the Hungarian army were accused
of beating Balazs and then tossing his body into the Danube
River. Zentai denies the charges.
The federal government approved Zentai's extradition to Hungary
in 2009 but the decision was overturned on appeal in the
Federal Court in 2011. The government then sought the ruling
of the justices of nation's highest court, who reserved their
decision in March before dismissing the appeal Wednesday.
Zuroff, the New York-born Nazi hunter who tracked Zentai
down, said the ruling "means
that the Australian effort to bring Holocaust-era war criminals
to justice has not had a single success."
Zuroff said the Australian justices had "ignored
numerous international precedents" in which war criminals were extradited to stand trial for genocide, war crimes
or crimes against humanity despite the fact that these criminal
categories had not existed at the time of the crime.
The Australian court system has reviewed charges against
three suspected Holocaust-era war criminals, none of whom
were convicted. One, Konrads Kalejs, an alleged leader of
Latvia’s notorious Arajs Kommando unit, accused of murdering
thousands of Jews and gypsies in Riga in 1942-43, died in
Australia in 2001 while awaiting a court decision of whether
he should be extradited to his native Latvia.
The ruling shows that "Australia
was the right destination for the numerous Nazi war criminals
and collaborators, none of whom was ever successfully prosecuted
or extradited, despite their heinous crimes," said Zuroff, who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office. "In that respect, Australia has the worst record among the major Anglo-Saxon democracies,
all of whom allowed the entry of numerous Nazi helpers after
World War II."
Zentai is believed to be Australia's last Nazi-era war crimes
suspect.
jta.org
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