Slawomir Wiktur Palonka wins appeal against extradition to Poland

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The Supreme Court allowed Slawomir Wiktur Palonka’s appeal and refused to surrender him to Poland under a warrant relating to a 1999 cannabis offence. The proceedings were reported on 8 February 2022.

Palonka imported cannabis into Poland in 1999 and was convicted in 2002. He received a suspended sentence. He was convicted a second time after further cannabis importation in 2003. He pleaded guilty to the two offences.

An appeal concerning the second conviction concluded in January 2004, and the court determined that the sentences for the two offences should be combined into 10 months’ imprisonment. In 2006, a Polish court activated the suspended sentence for the first offence.

An earlier surrender order based on a 2012 warrant was struck down by the Irish Court of Appeal in 2015. A fresh warrant issued in January 2019 related to the 1999 offence. The High Court ordered Palonka’s surrender in 2019, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision in 2020 and sent the case back for further fact-finding.

Giving the final Supreme Court decision, Mr Justice Peter Charleton found that surrender would cause an exceptional and oppressive disruption to Palonka’s family life in Ireland. The court also cited the exceptional delay and the absence of information explaining why Polish authorities had relied on the 1999 offence only after surrender for the 2003 offence had been refused.