Karlsruhe, Germany - Germany's highest court rejected Wednesday a challenge by John Demjanjuk, 89, against his deportation in May from the United States to Germany. Demjanjuk is likely to be indicted in Munich next month on charges that he helped as an auxiliary SS guard to drive 29,000 Jews into gas chambers in a Nazi death camp at Sobibor in occupied Poland in 1943.
The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled that Demjanjuk had not identified any particular rights under German constitutional law which had been breached through his removal to Germany.
At the time, his US and German legal team sought court injunctions to stop his removal from his Ohio home to the sick bay of a Munich prison. Although the expulsion went ahead, they tried to persuade the highest German court to retroactively declare it illegal.
But the German justices said they could not interfere in the acts of the United States as a sovereign power.
They added that he had not demonstrated a breach of any specific fundamental right under German law.
Demjanjuk's is one of three war-crimes cases current in Germany. Josef Scheungraber, 90, is on trial for allegedly killing 14 Italians in 1943. Another man, 88, is to be indicted for assassinating three Dutch resistance activists in 1944.
Ukrainian-born and now stateless, Demjanjuk lived in Germany as a refugee until 1952. Last week, government doctors pronounced him fit to stand trial for up to three hours per day with a break between.
His lawyers had argued that his expulsion from the United States as an "extradition in disguise," saying special rights apply to extraditions, but could not be exercised in the Demjanjuk case.
However the court said the US-German extradition treaty would not have offered Demjanjuk any additional rights and his lawyers had failed to show that any specific rights had been breached in the case.
"His claim is, in essence, a general complaint about the procedures used by the US authorities," the verdict said. However acts of other states were not justiciable at the court in Karlsruhe.
