The Supreme Court has dismissed Tomasz Franciszek Kaploniak's appeal against his surrender to Poland to serve a two-year prison sentence that was activated after he committed a further offence.
Ms Justice Iseult O'Malley held that the rules governing trials held in a person's absence did not require Polish authorities to prove that Kaploniak knew a later conviction could trigger an earlier suspended sentence.
Kaploniak pleaded guilty in Poland in July 2008 to several minor fraud offences and received a two-year sentence suspended for five years. In April 2009 he committed another fraud-type offence. The following month he signed a formal document consenting to conviction without evidentiary proceedings and accepting a proposed sentence of ten months' imprisonment suspended for two years.
The Polish court imposed that agreed sentence in January 2010 while Kaploniak was absent. His earlier two-year sentence was then activated in September 2010 because the new conviction breached the terms of its suspension.
None of the specific safeguards for an in-absentia conviction set out in section 45 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 had been satisfied. However, the courts were still entitled to consider whether Kaploniak had otherwise knowingly waived his right to attend.
The Supreme Court found that he had formally consented to the procedure under which the later conviction and agreed sentence could be imposed without him. The relevant "consequences" of non-attendance, O'Malley J held, were the consequences of that hearing itself, not the separate legal consequence that the new conviction would activate the earlier sentence.
The court also rejected an argument that Polish authorities had to prove Kaploniak received independent legal advice about that wider consequence. It noted that he had never given evidence that he lacked advice or misunderstood the agreement, having instead sworn an inaccurate affidavit claiming he knew nothing about the later charge.
The appeal was dismissed, leaving the High Court's surrender decision in place.