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Polish Government Revives Effort To Extradite Roman Polanski

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — The Polish government said Tuesday it would revive an effort to extradite filmmaker Roman Polanski, whose return to the United States has been sought by authorities in California for decades after he fled in the aftermath of a 1977 conviction for having sex with a 13-year-old girl who had been drugged.

A judge in Krakow ruled on Oct. 30 that turning over Polanski would be an "obviously unlawful" deprivation of liberty and that the state of California was unlikely to provide humane conditions of confinement for the 82-year-old film director. The Krakow prosecutor's office later said it would abide by ruling.

But Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who is also Poland's chief prosecutor, said he had decided to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, according to news reports from Europe.

He said the decision by the judge in Krakow had been a breach of the extradition agreement between the U.S. and Poland.

Ziobro added he disagreed with the judge's decision that Polanski had, in effect, already been punished. He also criticized as "incomprehensible" the Krakow judge's comments that Polanski would face inhumane treatment if extradited to the United States.

What will happen next in the Polanski saga is not clear. Polanski has been in Poland -- he holds French and Polish citizenship -- to work on a film about Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army captain wrongly convicted of spying for Germany in 1894.

(©2016 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)

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