The High Court has ordered the surrender of a man to Poland on three European arrest warrants, rejecting his objections to each warrant. The judgment was delivered by Ms Justice Donnelly on 20 December 2016.
The first warrant seeks his surrender to serve the outstanding part of a one-year-and-six-month sentence for four fraud or forgery offences. The second seeks his surrender for prosecution on two currency-counterfeiting offences. The third seeks his surrender to serve a one-year-and-four-month sentence for possessing and selling a gas weapon without a required licence.
The respondent argued that the first two warrants were invalid because Poland sent corrected versions signed by a different judge after the original judge had died. The court held that the issuing authority and the reason for the replacement signatures were clear, and accepted the warrants as valid. It said the question of whether Poland’s correction procedure was valid under Polish law was for the Polish authorities, and found no ambiguity in essential details required by Irish law.
On the third warrant, the court sought further information about the weapon before deciding whether the offence corresponded to an offence in Ireland. A Polish ballistics report described it as a gas firearm designed to discharge chemically incapacitating substances. The court found that it was designed to discharge noxious gas and that possessing it without a firearm certificate corresponded to an offence under Irish firearms law. It rejected the respondent’s objection that the warrant lacked sufficient detail about when and where the alleged conduct occurred, accepting the additional information provided by the Polish authority.
The respondent also said his sentences had been combined on appeal and that he no longer had to serve the sentence under the third warrant. The court found that he had not served any of that sentence and had produced no evidence that the sentences were aggregated. It rejected that objection.
The court also rejected his Article 8 European Convention on Human Rights objection. The respondent said he had lived in Ireland since 2005, had separated from his wife in 2014 and worked cleaning rental cars at Dublin Airport when arrested. The court acknowledged that surrender would interfere with his life in Ireland, but found that his circumstances did not make surrender disproportionate given the public interest and the offences involved.
The court concluded that it could order surrender to a person authorised by Poland to receive him on each of the three warrants. The judgment records the order; it does not state that the surrender had already taken place.