A Polish court due to rule on a United States’s request to extradite filmmaker Roman Polanski over a 1977 child sex conviction will sit on September 22, it said on Thursday.
Polanski, who holds joint Polish and French nationality, lives in Paris so any Polish extradition order would not force his return to the US. However, Polanski hopes to make a film in his homeland, a plan that would be jeopardised if the extradition request is granted.
The case was adjourned in May when the court said it needed more information from authorities in the US, where Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to having sex with a 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot in Los Angeles.
Polanski served 42 days in a US jail as part of a 90-day sentence he received in a plea-bargain deal. He fled the US the following year, believing the judge hearing his case could overrule the deal and put him in jail for years.
In 2009, Polanski was arrested in the Swiss city of Zurich on a US warrant and placed under house arrest. He was freed in 2010 after Swiss authorities decided not to extradite him.
Now 82, the filmmaker is viewed by many Poles as one of their greatest living cultural figures.
Internationally renowned for such films as Chinatown and The Pianist, Polanski is making a film about the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that shook France more than a century ago.
