Please find below the ECAJ’s media release regarding the death of Hungarian-born Karoly (Charles) Zentai, who reportedly died in Western Australia on 13 December 2017.

Australia has one of the finest and fairest legal systems in the world, but as a society we have a long record of failure to address his­tor­ic­al injustices until it is too late. For decades, gov­ern­ment and non-gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions turned a blind, but often knowing, eye to child sexual abuse, abori­gin­al deaths in custody, the stolen children and the entry of war criminals into Australia from conflicts all over the world.
A 2006 US-gov­ern­ment com­mis­sioned report accused Australia of having “an ambi­val­ent” attitude to hunting Nazi war criminals in par­tic­u­lar, and a “lack of the requisite political will”.
The case of Hungarian-born Karoly (Charles) Zentai, who reportedly died in Western Australia on 13 December 2017, confirms this assess­ment. He was accused of detaining and beating to death Peter Balasz, an 18 year old Jewish youth, and throwing his body in the Danube River in Nazi-occupied Budapest in November 1944.
In 2012, Australia’s High Court ruled that the Aus­trali­an gov­ern­ment could not order Zentai’s extra­di­tion to Hungary to face a criminal trial, because the offence of “war crime” did not exist under Hungary’s laws in 1944. The decision was widely cri­ti­cised as a triumph of narrow legalism over sub­stant­ive justice. Dis­sent­ing judge Dyson Heydon said that the Court’s decision was an “extremely technical one”, noting that in reality Zentai was wanted for “beating a Jew to death in Budapest in 1944”.
It might seem hard to imagine that a grey-haired old man could have committed unspeak­able crimes in his youth, unrelated to any military oper­a­tions that were going on at the time. Aus­trali­ans are fortunate in never having known the daily horror of living under a total­it­ari­an gov­ern­ment. The very idea of killing a teenage boy because of his religious or ethnic back­ground is well beyond the range of exper­i­ences of most of us.
But there is something we can all under­stand. The surviving relatives of Peter Balazs were not looking for vengeance. They wanted the whole truth about what happened to Peter to be revealed after all these long years, to put their anguish to rest. The loved ones of any victim of an alleged murder would have demanded no less. Now they will be denied even that small con­sol­a­tion.
No accused Nazi war criminal has ever been punished in Australia. The US, Canada and the UK all have a far better record than Australia in bringing war criminals to justice, extra­dit­ing them and stripping them of cit­izen­ship.
Over the years Australia has accepted as citizens accused war criminals not only from World War II but also from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Afgh­anistan, Indonesia and Cambodia. They blend in seam­lessly with the rest of Aus­trali­an society. Exploit­ing our tolerance and naivety, they walk freely among us and our children.
For­give­ness can be a powerful healing sentiment in the appro­pri­ate cir­cum­stances, but not when the wrongdoer seeks no for­give­ness, shows no remorse and does everything possible to evade justice.