Polish Judges Don’t Trust to Belarusian Colleagues

16.05.2007.

The district court of Wroclaw (Poland) decided not to extradite to the Belarusian authorities 30-year-old Belarusian Maksim Ramenchyk. The extradition on robbery charges was requested by the Belarusian prosecutor’s office.

According to the judge Mariusz Wionek, ‘in the present situation it is impossible to extradite to Belarus Maksim Ramenchyk according to the Polish legislation’. The court didn’t discriminate whether Ramenchyk was guilty in what the prosecutor’s office accused him, but decided whether the prisoner would stand a fair trial in the case of extradition.

‘There are serious grounds to think he would not stand a fair trial in Belarus’, the judge stated.

At the trial Ramenchyk’s lawyer Wojcech Sury said that after 1998 Maksim many times visited Belarus, but wasn’t arrested. ‘Then, when he joined several pro-Belarusian organizations and started organizing Belarusian actions, he was reminded about his ‘crimes’, Sury commented.

The prosecutor’s office of Belarus accused Maksim Ramenchyk of a robbery and thefts performed in autumn 1998, but the extradition request was sent only this year, after Maksim lived 9 years in Poland and graduated from Wroclaw University.

The public organization Now Belarus distributed a special statement on Ramenchyk’s case that all charges of the prosecutor’s office had been fabricated.