Roman Polanski faces a fresh extradition attempt after Poland's government said Tuesday that it will appeal a court decision that denied a U.S. extradition request related to a 1977 child sex crime conviction.
In October, a Polish court rejected the U.S. request for extradition, which was made after Polanski made a high-profile appearance in Warsaw in 2014,
Reuters reported.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker went on the run after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl during a photoshoot in Los Angeles in 1977. He served 42 days in prison as part of a plea deal but fled over concerns that it would be overturned.
The decision to appeal comes after Poland's conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party merged the posts of justice minister and prosecutor general, Reuters said. The newly merged post was assumed by Zbigniew Ziobro, a critic of the court's decision to deny extradition.
"If he was just a regular guy, a teacher, doctor, plumber, decorator, then I'm sure he'd have been deported from any country to the U.S. a long time ago," Ziobro said.
Polanski has continued his career while in exile and won an Oscar for his film "The Pianist" in 2003,
CNN noted.
The victim, who identified herself as Samantha Geimer, wants the matter dropped, according to CNN, which quoted 2009 court filings in which she said, "Every time this case is brought to the attention of the court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others. That attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case."
Polanski, 82, has dual citizenship in France and Poland,
The New York Times reported.
Polanski's lawyer, Jan Olszewski, said the he wasn't surprised by the new push for extradition.
“We had been expecting the minister to do it,” he said, according to the Times. “We are not pondering here the question of whether Polanski is guilty or not — the judge was very clear in this regard. We are discussing whether Roman Polanski can be extradited. These are two different things.”
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