BRATISLAVA, July 30, (WEBNOVINY) — Slovak Justice Minister Tomas Borec announced on Monday that he is personally interested in seeing the convicted war criminal Laszlo Csatary extradited from Hungary to Slovakia, so that he would serve his sentence here and not in the country of our southern neighbor. After last week the Justice Ministry received Csatary’s prosecution file including the court verdict from 1948 from the Nation’s Memory Institute, it has immediately passed on this file to the District Court in Kosice with a request for swift action in this case. Justice Minister Borec informed about this at a press conference in Bratislava.
„We realize that because of the length of time that has passed we are facing one of the last chances to punish war crimes of World War II,“ Borec said. He pointed out that no statute of limitation applies to crimes Csatary perpetrated and he cannot be exonerated by reference to mere fulfillment of orders. Whether Csatary will be extradited to Slovakia will depend on whether the Slovak court asks for his extradition and whether the Hungarian court responds positively or negatively to such request, he said. Borec stressed that the Slovak Justice Ministry will continue to be interested in the case. „We will not be silent, on the contrary, I will be personally interested in what action the court chooses,“ he said and added he would not want any delays to appear in this case.
As to what sentence Csatary would serve if he was extradited to Slovakia, State Secretary of Ministry of Justice Monika Jankovska said that is hard to predict. „In the event that will be extradited to Slovakia under the European arrest warrant, we assume that the court will decide to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment,“ she explained.
Hungarian security forces arrested Laszlo Csatary (97) earlier this month after they were tipped off by an investigative reporter from the British tabloid The Sun. He is accused of war crimes and involvement in the deportation of 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. He is also made responsible the cruel treatment of people in the Kosice Jewish ghetto. Csatary was a high-ranking police officer in Kosice, which was then part of Hungary. Czechoslovak authorities sentenced Csatary to death in absentia in 1948. Until in 1995, he managed to hide in Canada, from where he fled after his true identity was uncovered. The Simon Wiesenthal Center registers Csatary as currently the most wanted Nazi war criminal.
SITA