A 90-year-old man accused of war crimes has won a legal battle against attempts to extradite him to Hungary, to face charges of war crimes.
Charles Zentai, who has lived in Australia for almost 60 years, won the battle after the High Court up held a decision stating he could not be extradited because the offence of “war crimes” did not exist in Hungarian law at the time of the alleged offence.
The US based Simon Wiesenthal Center lists Zentai amongst the top 10 most wanted for having "participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944."
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter from the Center was outraged at the decision stating,
“I’m fuming, I’m fuming. It’s simply awful, a total failure on Australia’s part. They live on a different planet. The decision not to extradite him is simply a scandal,”
“Australia totally failed in terms of extraditing Nazi criminals – as opposed to other English-speaking countries, like Canada and the U.S.”
“There are a ton of legal precedents in which people were tried for crimes that weren’t in the law books when they were committed. The Nuremberg Trials were based on that.”
Zentai was accused by Hungarian Authorities of beating to death Jewish teenager Peter Balazs for not wearing a yellow Star of David, in Budapest in 1944. Zentai then allegedly dumped the body in the Danube, with the help of two other soldiers.
Zentai told Australian television in 2008,
"As a soldier I just had to carry out orders ... but none of those orders I was given had anything to do with rounding up Jews or torturing them or anything like that".
