Poland’s justice minister declares that he will appeal a court decision not to extradite the Oscar-winning director.
Famed director Roman Polanski is a wanted man in the United States, and nearly four decades after he fled the USA for having sex with a thirteen year old minor, Polanski faces a fresh extradition challenge in Poland. The Polish government, a key American ally in Eastern Europe, has announced it would appeal a court decision not to force him to face U.S. courts for his 1977 child sex conviction.
Polanski has long evaded arrest and extradition back to the United States, spending the majority of the past forty years in Paris and Switzerland, two places that don’t force fugitives to be extradited to the United States.
But U.S. authorities quickly jumped on the opportunity to act on extradition proceedings after Polanski appeared in Poland in 2014 to announce plans to make a film there.
Polanski keeps an apartment in Krakow, in southern Poland, where he is currently preparing a film based on the Dreyfus Affairs, a notorious case of the miscarriage of justice in early 20th-century France, which proves to be an ironic subject matter for a man who has evaded legal justice for the second half of his life.
Polish authorities are eager to use Polanski as an example that social status or fame will not merit preferential treatment in a truly equitable and just society, which is what Poland’s new right-wing government aspires their homeland to be.
