1981: an overview: Polovchak case (12/27/81)

1981: an overview

Polovchak case

It has been a hectic year for 14-year-old Walter Polovchak, the Ukrainian lad who touched off a diplomatic and legal tug-of-war in July 1980 when he ran away from his parents to avoid returning with them to the USSR. He has been embroiled in a legal-battle ever since.

Even though Chicago attorney Julian Kulas has said that his client is adjusting well to life in America, his legal status remains up in the air. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Polovchaks, has claimed all along that the U.S. government was ill-advised to grant Walter, then a 12-year-old minor, political asylum, particularly in light of the fact that scant evidence had been submitted in an Illinois juvenile court that Walter had suffered any physical or mental abuse from his parents.

This summer, it seemed like the Justice Department was on the verge of reversing itself and withdrawing the religious asylum it had granted Walter. It seemed young Walter was about to be sold out.

But on August 28, much to the chagrin of the ACLU and Walter's parents, who by this time had returned to the Soviet Union and according to Soviet sources, were prating on about CIA drugging of their son and other such things, the Justice Department announced that it "would continue to defend vigorously" the asylum granted the lad.

Citing the so-called supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution, government lawyers argued that federal authority over immigration matters and foreign policy supercedes the discretion of the Illinois court, which is bound not to rule in any manner that could vitiate the government's grant of asylum and facilitate his return to the Soviet Union.

The ACLU disagrees, and the battle continues in the Illinois Appellate Court. The case, like the Madrid Conference on security and cooperation in Europe, could drag on for years.

Meanwhile, Walter seems to be coping well. In November, his lawyers petitioned a Cook County Court to allow an aunt and uncle in California to adopt him. By the time all the complex legal matters are sorted out, Walter could be of age, and granting custody to his parents then would be highly unlikely. In the Polovchak case, slow justice may have its rewards.

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