The High Court has ordered the surrender of Michał Skorczyk to Poland to serve a sentence of one year and six months’ imprisonment imposed in 2010 for a deception-type offence committed in 2005.
In a judgment delivered on 10 March 2021, Mr Justice Paul Burns dismissed Skorczyk’s objection that the European arrest warrant contained unacceptable uncertainty about the sentence. The warrant, dated 27 April 2015, had described the sentence as “an aggregate sentence” in one section while referring to one offence in another.
The court sought clarification from the issuing judicial authority. In a reply dated 21 January 2021, that authority said the reference to an aggregate sentence was a mistake and confirmed that Skorczyk had been convicted and sentenced for the single offence identified in the warrant. The judge said the additional information removed any ambiguity about the sentence to be served and the offence for which it was imposed.
The judgment records that Skorczyk’s counsel pursued only this ground of objection at the hearing. The judge dismissed it.
The court also found that the statutory minimum-gravity requirements were met, that no specified statutory grounds prohibited surrender, and that the warrant’s tick-box procedure had been properly relied upon. It said that, if necessary, the offence could be matched to deception under Irish law.
The judge noted that Skorczyk had appeared at the hearing that resulted in the enforceable judgment and that no issue arose under section 45 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. Having dismissed the objection, the court ordered surrender to Poland under section 16(1) of the Act.