The High Court has ordered the surrender of a man to Poland under a European arrest warrant, finding that his absence from a hearing revoking a suspended sentence did not prevent the warrant from being executed.
The judgment concerns a Polish sentence of one year’s imprisonment imposed in 2015 for a computer attack on a company server and threats seeking a 200 zloty payment. The sentence was initially suspended for five years. The warrant sought the remaining sentence, after a Polish court revoked the suspension in 2017.
The respondent argued that surrender was prohibited because he had not been notified of, or attended, the proceedings that led to the later conviction and the revocation hearing. The later conviction, for burglary and theft, was imposed in his absence. He said he had not known about that prosecution and could not defend himself. The Polish authorities said summonses were sent to an address he had provided; he disputed providing an address or being warned about the consequences of not being contactable.
Justice Binchy said the evidence did not establish that the respondent actually received the summonses or knew the hearing dates. The court nevertheless resolved the disagreement over notification and address details in favour of the applicant, in keeping with the trust and confidence owed to the issuing judicial authority.
The judge rejected the argument that the revocation hearing engaged fair-trial protections in a way that barred surrender. He found that the Polish court relied on the later conviction when revoking the suspension; it did not itself decide whether the respondent was guilty of another offence. The revocation hearing concerned execution of the sentence already imposed, did not change its nature or length, and was not the trial resulting in the decision for the purposes of the European arrest warrant rules.
The relevant trial was the 2015 proceeding, which the respondent had attended and whose compliance with the applicable surrender requirements was not disputed. The court also found that surrender was not incompatible with Ireland’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. It concluded that the requirements for surrender had been met and ordered surrender for the purpose described in the warrant. The judgment does not decide the respondent’s challenge to the later conviction; it notes that the ordinary appeal period had expired and that an extraordinary legal remedy would be needed to challenge it.