July 8 (Bloomberg) -- John Demjanjuk, the 89-year-old accused of being a Nazi death-camp guard, lost a bid to have Germany’s top constitutional court overturn his extradition from the U.S.

The Federal Constitutional Court rejected his claim that Germany should have asked for his extradition under a treaty with the U.S. instead of taking him outside of formal procedures, the court said in an e-mailed statement today.

Demjanjuk was deported from the U.S. and taken into custody in Germany in May based on an arrest warrant that said evidence suggests he assisted in the killing of Jews as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in then German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, has denied the allegations.

“The complainant overlooks that under an international law treaty only the state can claim rights, not an individual person,” the court said. “Demjanjuk is only summarily criticizing the U.S. authorities’, whose acts are those of a foreign nation that this court cannot review.”

By circumventing the extradition treaty, Germany denied Demjanjuk a way to demonstrate he had already been tried and acquitted for the alleged crimes in Israel, his lawyer Ulrich Busch said in a telephone interview. Demjanjuk will appeal the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, he said.

Demjanjuk didn’t state which rights were violated here, the court said. The actions at issue were exclusively those of U.S. authorities and Germany’s declaring that it would accept Demjanjuk didn’t have any “immediate legal consequences” for him, the judges wrote.

Munich prosecutors said July 3 Demjanjuk is fit for trial so long as his time in court is limited. They expect to charge him this month over claims he assisted in the murder of 29,000 Jews during World War II.

To contact the reporter on this story: Karin Matussek in Berlin at kmatussek@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 8, 2009 05:12 EDT