The Court of Appeal has upheld a High Court refusal to order disclosure of Garda interview recordings and notes sought by two men facing European Arrest Warrant proceedings.
The application concerned whether the men could obtain the records to support an objection based on the right to silence before a hearing on their proposed surrender to Northern Ireland. The Court of Appeal stressed that it was deciding only the discovery application, not the separate question of surrender or disclosure for the defence of any criminal charges.
The men are alleged to have been involved in an attempt to place an explosive device under a PSNI officer’s vehicle in Derry on 18 June 2015, before travelling across the border into Donegal. They were arrested there that day and interviewed while in Garda detention. The judgment records that UK authorities sought their surrender for prosecution in Northern Ireland.
The men argued that they needed the interview records to support an objection concerning the different treatment of silence under the legal regime in Northern Ireland. The State accepted at the appeal hearing that the Gardaí had not warned them about the possibility of trial in Northern Ireland or how the right to silence operated there.
The Court said that admission meant the records were not necessary to establish whether such a warning had been given. It also found the applicants had not put forward enough evidence about what occurred in the interviews or about the relevant Northern Ireland law to show how the recordings and notes would support their objection.
The judges distinguished two possible arguments. A general objection to surrender based on how silence might be treated at a future trial had no connection to past Garda interviews, they said. A second argument—that the men might have made different choices in interview had they known they could face trial in Northern Ireland—could potentially connect the interviews to the future trial. But the records were not shown to be necessary to advance that argument.
The court upheld the High Court decision refusing discovery. It did not decide whether either man should be surrendered, or the merits of the right-to-silence objection. The judgment noted that the substantive European Arrest Warrant application was scheduled for a High Court hearing on 5 and 6 December 2019.