Report. Extradition cases in Poland 2022–2024
This is the first edition of a report devoted to extradition practice in Poland, in the years 2022–2024. For many months we collected and analysed statistics and decisions by the courts and prosecutors’ offices in extradition cases. Our aim was to form a picture of how this institution functions in practice.
Extradition cases, which occur at the intersection of law and politics, often include a huge dose of drama. Extradition is not just a technical instrument of international cooperation or a “courtesy” of one country towards another. It is an act of legal solidarity between countries sharing certain values, an expression of attachment to the ideal of justice, and confirmation of the principle of the inescapability of criminal liability. But applying this instrument does require attention to the fate of the extradited person.
Extradition requests mainly involve persons accused of committing serious offences, or perpetrators of such offences hoping to escape punishment in another country. A few requests concern persons who have not been tried for their actions in their own country, but are being brought to justice before the courts of another country or an international tribunal. Today, in a time of rising geopolitical tensions, the institution of extradition (like the system of Interpol notices) is increasingly employed instrumentally. Some countries misuse extradition to prosecute their political opponents or persons who have fled persecution.
We sought to explore such issues as:
- Who submits extradition requests to Poland
- Whom those requests concern
- How the courts and the Ministry of Justice assess the legitimacy of these requests
- What arguments play a key role in extradition decisions
- How the courts deal with objections by the person sought that the prosecutions are political
- What significance the courts ascribe to the risk of infringement of human rights in the requesting country, and what evidentiary grounds the courts use to decide these issues
- How the case law from other courts (domestic and foreign) impacts their determinations
- How international practice is reflected in Polish cases.
Compiling material for the report was not easy. We had to seek data from the regional prosecutors’ offices, the common courts, the Supreme Court of Poland, the Ombudsman, and the Ministry of Justice.
Not all of our requests for information were granted, and some of the responses were selective. We don’t attribute this attitude to bad faith, but to an absence of accurate and complete gathering, analysis and publication of this data by the public administration in Poland.
Most judicial rulings in extradition cases aren’t published at all, and can be obtained only through the channel of access to public information. The requests are handled manually, which generates a risk of error, and can raise resistance, particularly at units handling many cases of this type, because before the data are turned over it is necessary to anonymise them. In our view, decisions from the courts should, as a rule, be published in full, so that it is possible to draw general conclusions.
We hope that our report sheds light on the extradition practice in Poland. We would like the report to serve as a tool for practitioners—judges, prosecutors, advocates—but also as a source of knowledge for our colleagues in other countries. We have drawn on their experience numerous times in the cases we handle, inquiring whether courts in other jurisdictions will grant extradition to a given country, what evidence of human rights violations they will recognise, and when, if ever, diplomatic assurances are deemed sufficient. Our report should serve as a response to these same questions within Poland.
This is the first edition of the report. We plan to update this work each year. We hope that our efforts will meet with support from public institutions, which may decide in the future to systematically compile and release data about extradition.
Extradition is after all a tool that should be used cautiously, with an awareness of its consequences and responsibility for the fate of the individual—in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable.
Dr Artur Pietryka, adwokat, Łukasz Lasek, adwokat, Business Crime practice, Wardyński & Partners
