From the Oz:

Zentai loses High Court appeal
Paige Taylor
April 23, 2008

PERTH great-grandfather Charles Zentai has lost his High Court appeal, paving the way for Australia’s first extradition of a suspected Nazi-era war criminal.

The High Court of Australia today ruled the nation’s extradition act was valid, meaning the former Hungarian warrant officer will face the Perth Magistrates Court within months.

The prospect of being flown to Budapest to face trial for the murder of teenage Jew Peter Balazs in 1944 now looms large for the retired mental health nurse, 86.

Mr Zentai launched his legal challenge soon after Australian Federal Police arrested him at his home unit in the southern Perth suburb of Willetton on July 8, 2005.

Budapest prosecutors began compiling their case against Mr Zentai from archived witness statements of the postwar Budapest People’s Court.

But he denies any involvement in the crime and says he left Budapest the day before Balazs was killed.

His son Ernie Steiner has worked to uncover inconsistencies in the testimony of witnesses who implicated Mr Zentai, and he says the case against his father is based on the evidence of those with sinister motives or who were tortured during their interrogations.

The High Court decision finds that commonwealth laws giving state magistrates the power to rule on extradition applications, such as the one from the Republic of Hungary asking for Mr Zentai’s extradition, were valid.

Mr Zentai was joined in his legal challenge to the validity of the extradition act by two others facing extradition - Irishman Vincent Thomas O’Donaghue and American Larry Richard Williams, the Sydney-based father of movie star Michelle Williams.

Ireland has sought the extradition of Mr O’Donoghue on fraud charges and the US has sought the extradition of Mr Williams on tax charges.

All three men claimed that section 19 of the Extradition Act was invalid because it involved a constitutionally impermissible attempt by the commonwealth parliament to impose a duty upon magistrates as holders of a state statutory office.

They argued that commonwealth parliament lacked the power, without state legislative approval, to impose upon the holder of a state statutory office an enforceable administrative duty where the functions and incidents of that office were exhaustively defined by state legislation.

But, in a 6-1 majority of the High Court, they lost.

The decision came as a relief to the Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which lobbied the Hungarian government for Mr Zentai’s extradition in 2005.

SWC’s Jerusalem-based director Efraim Zuroff said it was a historic day for Australia.

“I’m very pleased that this legal technical challenge, which has already prevented Mr Zentai’s extradition for more than two years and has absolutely nothing to do with the case, has finally been rejected and that the extradition process can finally proceed,'’ he said.

“I think it’s extremely important to remember that it was Mr Zentai himself who, when he was first exposed as the person suspected of murdering Peter Balazs during the war, expressed his willingness to go to Hungary to clear his name.

“But soon after Hungary sought his extradition, which would have given him his day in court, Mr Zentai did everything possible to prevent justice from being achieved.’

“I’m only sorry that it took this long to put this case back on track.”

Dr Zuroff said there were other cases in which alleged Nazi-era criminals had been tried for crimes committed more than 60 years ago.

“A man named Michael Seifert was just extradited from Canada to serve a jail sentence in Italy for crimes committed at the Bolzano concentration camp in 1943, so it has been done and it can be done,'’ Dr Zuroff said.

“Last week, Germany indicted an alleged Nazi collaborator, Heinrich Boere from Holland, aged 86, who was charged with committing several murders in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II.'’

Dr Zuroff said the factor that had the most influence on such cases was “the quality of evidence against the accused and not the amount of time that passed since the crime”.

“It’s very important to remember that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrator.”