NAZI-HUNTERS say the decades-long push to bring World War II war criminals living in Australia to justice all but ended yesterday with the High Court's ruling against Charles Zentai's extradition to Hungary.
The 90-year-old Perth man had been accused of beating a Jewish teenager to death and throwing his body in the Danube River in Nazi-occupied Budapest in November 1944.
Yesterday, the High Court ruled that the government could not order Mr Zentai's extradition to Hungary because the offence of "war crime" did not exist under Hungary's laws in 1944.
The decision draws to a close the era of Nazi war crimes prosecutions in Australia - a troubled hunt that resulted in four failed court cases over 25 years at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
At its height, from 1987 to 1992, a Special Investigations Unit set up by the Hawke government examined up to 800 cases of suspected Nazi-era war criminals living in Australia, but a lack of hard evidence and the unreliability of aged witnesses made it difficult to lay charges.
Some questioned whether Australia's heart was really in the hunt to prosecute crimes committed half a century earlier. A 2006 US-government commissioned report accused Australia of having "an ambivalent" attitude to hunting Nazi war criminals and a "lack of the requisite political will".
Mr Zentai said yesterday he was stunned and happy at the High Court's decision but his life had been ruined by the case.
But the ruling infuriated the Jewish community. Efraim Zuroff, from the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, labelled it a black day for Australian justice and a terrible day for survivors of the Holocaust.
He said not one attempt to bring accused Nazi war criminals in Australia to justice had succeeded, and he believed it was now the end of the line.
"We are up against obstacles that are simply impossible," Mr Zuroff said. "If there is no judicial will to bring the criminals from World War II to justice in Australia, then it won't happen."
Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Danny Lamm said the decision would be seen by many as the triumph of narrow legalism over substantive justice.
In a 5-1 decision, the High Court said that, under Australia's extradition treaty with Hungary, the government could not surrender one of its citizens over acts capable of giving rise to any form of criminal liability, only for the specific offence for which extradition was sought.
It said that, although the offence of murder existed in Hungary in 1944, Hungary had not requested Mr Zentai's extradition for murder; rather, it had requested his extradition for the offence of "war crime".
Dissenting judge Dyson Heydon said that point was an "extremely technical one". Justice Heydon said that if Mr Zentai was returned to Hungary and convicted, an accurate answer if someone later asked him what he was convicted for was "beating a Jew to death in Budapest in 1944".
"The questioner could equally accurately answer: 'That's murder. That was certainly an offence in Hungary in 1944'," Justice Heydon said.
Hungary enacted laws in 1945 that retrospectively introduced the war crimes offence.
Mr Zentai, who is on bail, has denied any involvement in the death of teenager Peter Balazs since details of the claims against him were revealed in The Australian in 2005.
Some prosecutors in Australia say the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which has mounted a global campaign for Nazi war crimes prosecutions, gave them poorly researched lists of suspects.
In 1991 charges were laid against Mikolay Berezowsky for alleged involvement in the deaths of 102 Jews in Ukraine. The case did not proceed to trial.
In 1993 the South Australian Supreme Court acquitted Ivan Polyukovich of charges of murdering a Jewish woman in 1942 and being knowingly concerned with the murder of 850 others. The same year, mass murder charges against Heinrich Wagner were dropped because of his ill-health.
