last minute: imminent extradition to Poland averted

German Federal Constitutional Court's Order of 09.03.2016 - 2 BvR 468/16- Successful application for interim relief against the extradition of a German citizen to Poland based on EAW

The Federal Constitutional Court granted our application for a provisional injunction against the extradition of our client. At the very least, our client a German citizen it has been provisionally decided that he will not be handed over to Poland until his constitutional complaint is deliberated upon. Our client was to be held responsible for a charge of murder in Poland.

The chamber court of Berlin had already declared the extradition as admissible and the General Prosecutor´s office in Berlin subsequently also approved the extradition. However, we strongly believed that both decisions would violate the fundamental rights of our clients.

For this reason, we criticized the actions of the Federal Constitutional Court for infringing on Article 2 (2), as well as the Article 16 (2) of the Basic Law of Germany by means of those decisions. In applying Section 80 (1) of the IRG (International Legal Aid Law), the Chamber Court had disregarded the meaning of Article 16 (2) of the Basic Law.

The Federal Constitutional Court were able to stop the imminent threat of extradition with an interim injunction, because once the extradition had been carried out it would not be possible to reverse it. If a constitutional complaint does not appear hopeless from the outset, then the Federal Constitutional Court weighs the possible consequences of its decisions against each other. In this present case, the consideration of those ramifications led to the adoption of the interim injunction.