The High Court refused to surrender Robert Szall to Poland under a European arrest warrant after finding it was not satisfied that one of the six offences in the warrant corresponded to an offence under Irish law. The court said the non-corresponding offence could not be severed from the composite sentence imposed for all six offences.
The warrant sought Szall’s surrender to serve a three-year sentence imposed by the District Court of Dublin on 4 September 2008. Poland issued the warrant on 21 April 2009. The High Court endorsed it for execution in Ireland in December 2009. Szall was arrested at Aston Quay, Dublin, on 25 April 2011 and later admitted to bail pending a surrender hearing.
The dispute concerned offence VI in the warrant. It described a failure, between 6 March 2006 and 5 April 2007 in Lublin, to return to detention after a break in serving a penalty. The Polish authority had not identified the offence as one of the categories for which Irish law does not require a correspondence assessment. The parties did not dispute correspondence for the other five offences.
The Minister for Justice and Law Reform argued that the Polish offence corresponded to the Irish offence of being unlawfully at large under section 6 of the Criminal Justice Act 1960. The respondent argued that section 6 applied only to people temporarily released under sections 2 or 3 of that Act who then became unlawfully at large. He said the provision did not cover a person released by a Polish court, and that escape from custody was addressed by a separate common-law offence.
Justice Edwards said the respondent’s interpretation was probably correct. In any event, the judge had residual doubt about the meaning of section 6(2). Applying the principle that doubt about a penal provision should be resolved in favour of the accused, the court was not satisfied that offence VI corresponded to the Irish offence.
Because the three-year sentence was composite and covered all six offences, the court held that the non-corresponding offence could not be severed. It therefore refused surrender on the warrant. The judgment, delivered on 17 February 2012, was written under section 16(8)(a) of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 after the court decided not to make a surrender order under section 16(1).