Podraza (now Wrzosek) v District Court in Kraków: extradition appeal dismissed after 20-year delay

In Jerzy Maciej Podraza (now Wrzosek) v District Court in Kraków, Poland [2026] EWHC 380 (Admin), Mr Justice Dexter Dias dismissed an appeal against an extradition order, finding that neither abuse of process nor article 8 of the ECHR provided a sufficient bar to the appellant's return to Poland to serve an 18-month custodial sentence for dishonesty offences committed in 2000.

The appellant was convicted in Poland in 2003 and given a suspended sentence, subject to probation supervision. He left for the United Kingdom in 2004 without the court's consent, triggering the activation of the suspended term. A European Arrest Warrant was issued in 2007, and extradition proceedings commenced in England. The appellant failed to attend his hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court in 2008 — though his absence on that occasion was accepted as reasonable — and thereafter made no attempt to surrender. He remained on the Isle of Man, openly, until his arrest in October 2024. During the intervening years he applied twice, unsuccessfully, to have the Polish sentence set aside: once to the Polish courts in 2018 and once by presidential clemency petition in 2021.

Abuse of process

The appellant advanced two broad grounds for abuse of process: bad faith on the part of the authorities, and a fundamental compromise of system integrity arising from delay and the failure to execute the 2008 bench warrant.

The court found no evidential basis for bad faith. The loss of court files was, on the most plausible view, an administrative failure rather than deliberate concealment, and no rational motive for any authority to act maliciously against the appellant had been suggested. The skeleton argument had itself proceeded on a factually false premise — that no bench warrant was issued in 2008 — which was corrected once the warrant was located. This illustrated the dangers of drawing inferences from absent documentation.

On system integrity, the court reaffirmed that abuse of process is a residual jurisdiction, exercisable only where the statutory extradition regime itself has been usurped and the requested person suffers demonstrable forensic prejudice: Belbin v France [2015] EWHC 149 (Admin). No tactical advantage from the change of statutory regime had been identified. The appellant had himself absconded from the extradition proceedings, necessitating the fresh warrant under the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement arrangements. The court further noted that delay, however prolonged, is addressed within the statutory framework under section 14 of the Extradition Act 2003, and is not a free-standing ground for invoking the abuse jurisdiction. The appellant could not credibly claim a "false sense of security" when he had consistently been refused relief by the Polish courts and knew his sentence remained outstanding.

Article 8

Applying the Celinski balance sheet and the Supreme Court's recent guidance in Andrysiewicz v Poland [2025] UKSC 23 — that article 8 will defeat extradition only in cases of exceptionally severe family impact — the court upheld the district judge's proportionality assessment. The appellant's wife, a qualified engineer, had continued to manage the family's affairs during his conditional bail period in Coventry. The two young children, though affected, were receiving medical support and their difficulties were not irreversible. The court accepted that the British nationality of the children was not a weighty factor on these facts, since no one suggested they would be obliged to relocate to Poland.

The court also followed Pabian v Poland [2024] EWHC 2431 (Admin) in acknowledging that the UK authorities' prolonged failure to arrest the appellant on the 2008 warrant was relevant to the article 8 balance, as it had allowed him to establish deeper family roots. Some weight was afforded to this. Nevertheless, the public interest in extradition — encompassing comity, deterrence and the rule of law — prevailed. The appellant had knowingly built his family life on the fragile foundation of unresolved fugitive status, and the impact of extradition did not reach the threshold of exceptional severity.

The appeal was dismissed.

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