Maurice Papon, a French collaborator with the Nazis, has been released from prison after serving just three years of a ten year sentence, because his lawyers managed to convince a court of appeals that he was too old and sick to remain in jail.

There’s no doubt that he’s old and sick; he’s 92 and he has heart problems. But before getting all sentimental about the poor old man being locked away in the nasty prison to die, consider this: Maurice Papon was responsible for sending nearly 1,700 Jews to concentration camps between 1942 and 1944. Most were sent to Auschwitz, and most died.

Papon got away with it scot free. After the war, he became police chief in Paris (during which he time he may have been responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Algerian demonstrators), and he later served as budget minister. So much for denazification in France, then.

When the law finally caught up with him in 1998 and he was brought to court for his activities in the Vichy regime, his lawyers argued in his defense that he had "only been following orders". And in 1999, he wrote to the French justice minister that he felt no "regrets or remorse" for anything he had done during the war.

The man was found guilty of crimes against humanity - his signature is on the deportation orders, for pity’s sake! But despite that, he’s now free to go home. He’s off to "rest, rebuild his health and spend time with family and friends". In his villa.

And I just have to ask myself: where the hell is the justice in that? Okay, in a case like this, justice in a cosmic sort of sense can never really be done. No earthly punishment can truly redress the evil of a war criminal willing to consign over a thousand people (or a hundred people - or ten - or even one) to torture and death.

But earthly justice is all we have to go on here - so the least we could do is actually use it. Papon has evaded justice - earthly or otherwise - for decades. He shipped people off to the hell of Auschwitz while he sucked up to the Nazis and was rewarded for it. Since the war, he’s lived the good life - and a really long good life at that. He was undoubtedly confident in the knowledge that he would be able to live out the rest of his days in the freedom and comfort to which he has always been accustomed.

And now, sickeningly, it looks as though he was right.