The High Court has ordered the surrender of Marius Viplentas to Lithuania under section 16 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003, after rejecting his objections to the request.
Mr Justice Hunt delivered the judgment on 22 January 2016. The Lithuanian warrant, issued on 11 February 2014, sought Mr Viplentas for criminal prosecution. It concerned allegations which, if proved in Ireland, would correspond to assault causing harm and/or false imprisonment. The judgment does not determine whether those allegations are true.
The warrant was endorsed for execution by the High Court on 11 November 2014. Mr Viplentas was arrested by Garda Sean Fallon at the West Pier, Howth, on 11 June 2015 and brought before the court the following day. He lodged objections to surrender on 13 July 2015, which were heard on 19 November and 21 December.
His principal objection was that section 21A prohibited surrender because Lithuania had not decided to charge and try him for the offences in the warrant. He also argued that the request was really connected to his alleged flight from a pre-trial investigation, rather than prosecution for the underlying allegations. His lawyers separately challenged the form and admissibility of material supplied by Lithuanian authorities.
The judge held that information from the requesting judicial authority could be considered without being submitted by affidavit, provided its provenance was established. He found the communications attributed to Lithuania had come from the Prosecutor General’s Office. He also concluded that the original warrant was for prosecution and that the apparent defect in its English translation could be clarified as a translation error.
The court found that the statutory presumption of a decision to charge and try had not been displaced. It relied on information that the case was in Lithuania’s pre-trial investigation stage and on a prosecutor’s letter stating that Mr Viplentas’s departure meant the investigation could not be completed and the case referred to court. The judge considered that the prosecution had begun and that the detention measure imposed by a Lithuanian district court supported that process; he did not treat the request as being primarily about the consequences of leaving Lithuania.
Having found the statutory requirements for surrender satisfied, the High Court ordered Mr Viplentas’s surrender to Lithuania, or to a person duly authorised by that state to receive him. The order concerns surrender under the warrant; the judgment does not decide the underlying criminal allegations.