The High Court refused to surrender a man to the United Kingdom under a European arrest warrant, finding that his return to serve the remaining part of an indeterminate sentence would breach the Irish Constitution.
In a judgment delivered on 24 May 2012, Mr Justice Edwards said the respondent had already served the punitive part of an imprisonment for public protection sentence. If surrendered, he would face further detention whose purpose was to prevent future offending. The court concluded that this would depart markedly from the constitutional order and follow directly from a surrender order.
The warrant related to convictions at Harrow Crown Court in 2005 for attempted rape and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The respondent received an indeterminate sentence with a 30-month minimum term for attempted rape, and a concurrent two-year extended sentence for assault. He was released temporarily from prison in July 2010 but did not return on the required date. The warrant stated that the Parole Board was due to review his remaining sentence in October 2010 and that the Probation Service would not recommend release at that time.
The respondent contested surrender on several grounds, including that continued detention after the minimum term would be preventive and unconstitutional. The court accepted that, in the circumstances, surrender would result in preventive detention. It treated the constitutional guarantee of liberty as requiring detention to comply with fundamental norms of the legal order, including the presumption of innocence.
The court also found the relevant constitutional concern sufficiently close to the proposed surrender: the further detention was a direct consequence of surrender, not a remote possibility. It said the difference between the UK sentencing regime and Irish constitutional principles on preventive detention was fundamental.
The ruling was confined to whether surrender could be ordered in this case under the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. The court declined to make the requested surrender order. It did not set aside the UK convictions or sentence, nor determine when the respondent might otherwise be released under UK law.