Efraim Zuroff: This man's prosecution and conviction was a highly significant victory for historical truth

The release yesterday by a Paris appeals court of the convicted French Nazi war criminal Maurice Papon – after he had served only three years of a 10-year sentence for complicity in crimes against humanity – has once again highlighted the complexities of the efforts to bring the Holocaust perpetrators to justice more than half a century after they committed their crimes.

In this case, it was Papon's health that convinced the judges to free him, but that is only one of the arguments presented by those opposed to the contemporary attempts to prosecute Nazi war criminals. Others point to the passage of time, lack of available witnesses and various other legal and technical arguments.

Yet such reasoning misses the central element of these efforts, which is that the passage of time in no way diminishes the scope of the crime or the culpability of the perpetrator. And the fact that criminal X or Y has managed to elude justice for 20 or 30 or even 50 years does not reduce his or her responsibility for the crimes they committed, which means that if there is sufficient evidence to bring them to trial, it would be a travesty of justice not to do so.

If anything, the Papon case is a classic example of the importance of justice, even if it comes at a relatively late date.

Papon played an active role in, and signed the orders for, the deportation to Nazi death camps of approximately 1,600 Jews from Bordeaux during the German occupation of France. He should have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity shortly after the war, but in his case the opposite occurred. Protected by a government that sought to cover up French collaboration with the Nazis in the deportation of some 85,000 Jews, Papon had an outstanding career as a civil servant becoming chief of the Paris police in 1958 and achieving the rank of cabinet minister in 1978.

If anything, Papon's prosecution and conviction were a highly significant victory for historical truth and an important milestone – together with Jacques Chirac's apology for the crimes of Vichy – in France's tortuous path to confronting the complicity of the Vichy regime in the crimes of the Holocaust.

Under normal circumstances, perhaps it could have been argued that Papon's ostensibly poor health justified his release. But that would be ignoring two major points. One is his absolute refusal to acknowledge his crimes and the second is his attempt to escape to Switzerland after he had been convicted.

Both clearly prove he has learnt absolutely nothing and therefore is totally undeserving of sympathy, let alone lenience. Papon, who showed no remorse or sympathy for his victims should serve the full 10 years of his sentence and not one day less.

Efraim Zuroff is director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre