The alleged Nazi war criminal Charles Zentai will not be extradited by Australia to his native Hungary where is he wanted to face murder charges. On Wednesday, Australia’s High Court upheld an earlier Federal Court decision preventing the Perth resident’s extradition. Zentai, 90, is accused of murdering the 18-year-old Jewish man Peter Balazs in November 1944 while serving in the pro-German Hungarian army. Zentai categorically denies allegations that he beat Balazs to death and threw his body into the Danube River.
In 2009, Australia’s federal government approved Zentai's extradition to Hungary but the decision was overturned on appeal in the Federal Court in August 2011. That court ruled Zentai could not be extradited because the specific offense of "war crimes" did not exist in Hungarian law in 1944.
Labor Party lawmaker Mike Danby, who is Jewish, acknowledged the absence of such laws, but said the idea that in countries of Nazi-occupied Europe there would have been a specific offense of war crimes prior to 1945 demonstrated such "black-and-white legalism and historicism" that it was difficult to believe. He called for Hungarian authorities to re-frame the terms of the extradition to force Zentai's return.
"Of course there was a charge of murder," Danby told parliament in Canberra on Wednesday. "In any system of justice, in my opinion, this man should have been extradited to face the charges that the Hungarian government has brought against him."
Danny Lamm, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said in reaction to the High Court ruling: “This is a sad day for the family of Peter Balazs and those who wish Zentai to face his accusers. Zentai himself initially said that he was anxious to return to Hungary to clear his name, but that line was quickly abandoned.”
“From the reasoning of the majority of the judges of the High Court it appears that if the offence in relation to which extradition was sought had been specified by the Hungarian government as ‘murder’ rather than solely as a ‘war crime’, Zentai would not have been able to resist extradition,” Lamm declared, adding: “Although the Australian Jewish community has not been involved in the proceedings, it has the highest proportion of Holocaust survivors of any community outside of Israel... It will be distressing to many that Zentai will now live out his final days untroubled by any prospect of having to account for his past actions.”
