SENDING László Csatáry from Hungary to Slovakia might not be an easy task, according to the analysis of the possible scenarios of extradition prepared by Slovakia’s lawyers. They say that there are only two probable ways to extradite the 97-year-old Nazi war criminal from Slovakia’s southern neighbour, the SITA newswire wrote.
The first alternative involves the issuance of the European arrest warrant. The problem with that is that the district court in Košice, which already received a request to issue the warrant, cannot do it immediately since it has to prove that the death sentence passed by a court in Košice in 1948 has been changed to a sentence of life imprisonment.
If the Hungarian authorities do not accept this warrant, since Csatáry is registered as a Hungarian citizen, the local courts will have to ensure that he would begin any life-imprisonment sentence in Hungary, Lucia Mokrá, one of the authors of the analysis told SITA.
The second alternative concerns using the international extradition agreement signed between both countries, but this process might take several months, even years. The warrant, by contrast, might only take days to decide, Mokrá explained.
Csatáry is currently under house arrest in Hungary, where the police detained him on July 18 after decades at large. The local prosecutor’s office has started an investigation of charges filed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) which blames him for the deportation of nearly 16,000 Jews from Košice during World War II.
However, the Budapest Municipal Prosecutor’s Office has announced that Csatáry is not responsible for the 1941 deportation of Jews to Kamyanets-Podilsky, as is claimed by SWC.
A historian addressed by the prosecutor allegedly found documents which confirm that Csatáry was not present in Košice in 1941, i.e. at the time the deportations took place, said the spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, Bettina Bagoly, the TASR newswire reported.
