At the request of another country: Extradition cases in Poland 2022–2024
Reports 15.10.2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
