AC-2024-LON-003550 - [2025] EWHC 2831 (Admin)

It is wrong to submit that the Polish legal process infiltrates the jurisdiction of this country. Both are sovereign nations. Polish law and criminal process have no effect in this country. That is why the Polish state and its judicial authorities are known as the “requesting state”. It is a request for assistance, not a mandate. Obviously, questions of treaty and comity apply, but that does not extend the reach of the Polish legal process into the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. An analysis of the Divisional Court decisions in Pillar-Neumann and De Zorzi confirms this. For example, in Pillar-Neumann at para 70, the court said:

“70.

Nor was she knowingly placing herself beyond the reach of a legal process. She took no positive steps to place herself anywhere. The Respondent's case is that she was somehow obliged to place herself within the reach of a legal process instituted in another country and to leave and give up her home and lawful residence in the UK in order to do so. Not surprisingly, we have been shown no case in which it has been found, or even suggested, that failing to act in this way makes someone a fugitive.”

When the appellant was in the United Kingdom, she was beyond the reach of the Austrian legal process. Similarly, in De Zorzi at para 57:

“It cannot be said that that person knowingly placed herself beyond the reach of a legal process when they were already beyond its reach.”

When the appellant in De Zorzi was in the Netherlands (and indeed in the United Kingdom), she was beyond the reach of the French legal process. We do not have the interpenetration of the reach of sovereign legal processes. This submission is misconceived.