The Center, named after a famous Nazi-hunter, gave Croatia a F-2 mark which means failure in practice. Australia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine also received the same mark.

The report particularly singled out Hungary for failing to apprehend a well known Nazi officer.

“The most disappointing result in a specific case during the period under review has been Hungary’s failure hereto to bring to justice Dr. Sandor Kepiro, one of the officers who carried out the mass murder of hundreds of civilians in Novi Sad, Serbia on January 23, 1942 who was convicted but never punished for the crime and who was exposed by the Wiesenthal Centre living in Budapest in the summer of 2006,” the report points out.

Serbia, Austria and Poland received a C mark, reserved for countries with some but still insufficient results.

The top A mark was given to the United States, among 30 countries covered by the report from April 1 2007 to March 31 2008.

The only Croat on the Centre’s list of most wanted Nazis is Milivoj Asner, who was the police chief in the Croatian town of Slavonska Pozega, during the Second World War and suspected, according to the report, of having an “active role in persecution, deportation and deaths of hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies.”

Croatia indicted Asner and in 2005 requested the then 92-year-old’s extradition from Austria.

Vienna “initially refused the request because he ostensibly held Austrian citizenship. But when it emerged that he had lost his Austrian citizenship, his extradition was refused on medical grounds,” said the report.

Aribert Heim tops the list of 10 suspects, to be published by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and obtained in advance by The Associated Press news agency.

Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen, and now he is the most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal among hundreds who the Simon Wiesenthal Centre estimates are still free.

Austrian-born Heim would be 93 on Wednesday and “we have good reason to believe he is still alive”, said Efraim Zuroff, the centre’s top Nazi hunter.

The centre plans to release the most-wanted list and to open a media campaign in South America this summer, highlighting the £243,000 reward for Heim’s arrest posted by the centre along with Germany and Austria.

According to the advance copy of the list, the most wanted, after Heim, are:

John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the US, which says he was a guard at several death and forced labour camps;

Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of more than 1,000 civilians in Serbia;

Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and gypsies to their deaths;

Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.

UN Human rights expert Jean Ziegler
in Eritrea, 1976

To the sound of cheers, and by an overwhelming majority of 40 out of 47 votes, the UN Human Rights Council today elected Jean Ziegler, the co-founder of the “Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize,” as an expert adviser representing the Western world. And for its new Palestine expert, the council chose Richard Falk, who, like Ziegler, accuses the U.S. of being responsible for many of the world’s ills and describes Israel in Nazi terminology.

“Even within the benighted UN Human Rights council, today was a dark day for human rights,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights monitoring agency. “The very credibility of the UN human rights system is now at stake.”

Falk was approved by consensus. Canada afterward made a statement dissociating itself from the choice. The U.S., a non–voting observer, also took the floor to criticize Falk’s published writings.
Ziegler, criticized by many for his performance as former UN expert on the right to food, earned more votes than any of the other candidates.

Immediately after the vote, Swiss ambassador Blaise Godet left his seat, and, in front of all the diplomats in the plenary, walked over to warmly shake hands with the Cuban ambassador, both smiling as they congratulated each other. The Castro regime chairs the all-powerful Non-Aligned Movement.

“The Swiss Foreign Ministry has gone into the election of Ziegler with eyes wide open,” said Neuer. “The next time Ziegler praises Khaddafi, Castro or Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, they will bear direct responsibility. Having invested so much lobbying and vote-trading to install him, it is no longer credible for them to try and wash their hands of Ziegler’s abuses, claiming — as they tried to do in recent years — not to have any connection with him. From this day forward we will demand and expect the Swiss Foreign Ministry’s condemnation of his abuses, every single time.”