JURIST - Paper Chase: Hungary urged to prosecute alleged Nazi war criminal

[JURIST] The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) [advocacy website], a Jewish human rights organization committed to finding and prosecuting Holocaust war criminals, called on the government of Hungary to prosecute former Nazi Laszlo Csatary in its annual report [text, PDF; press release] issued Wednesday. Csatary was a police chief in Slovakia in 1944 and is alleged to have sent 15,400 Jewish people to Auschwitz. SWC has placed Csatary at the top of their list of most wanted Nazi war criminals. SWC indicates that Csatary escaped to Canada after World War II and lived there until 1997 when his citizenship was revoked. SWC's executive directed commented that recent efforts have located Csatary [Reuters report] and that they have transferred that information to Hungarian prosecutors. Csatary is reported to be 95 years old and in good health.

One of the major goals of SWC is to prosecute Nazi criminal suspects before they die. Nazi prosecution is still ongoing, despite the ages of the accused. In January, German prosecutors requested [JURSIT report] that convicted Nazi criminal Klaas Faber serve life sentence. Germany reopened investigations into former Nazi death camp guards in October 2011, which stemmed from the conviction of John Demjanjuk [JURIST reports], a former guard at a camp in Poland who was deported to Germany to stand trial for his alleged Nazi crimes. Alleged Nazi Sandor Kepiro died while he awaited an appeal [JURIST report] on his acquittal on war crimes charges. He had been charged with war crimes committed during the 1942 Novi Sad massacre in Serbia. Kepiro, 97, had been named as the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect by the SWC.