The Court of Appeal has dismissed Arkadiusz Piotr Lipinski’s appeal against an order for his surrender to Poland under a European Arrest Warrant. It held that section 45 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 did not require a rehearing of the later decision revoking his conditional release.
The appeal concerned whether section 45 applied because Lipinski was not present when a Polish court revoked his conditional release and ordered him to serve the remaining part of a sentence. The court said the issue was whether the proceedings in question resulted in the sentence named in the warrant.
Lipinski was sentenced in Poland in 1998 to 15 years’ imprisonment after conviction on what the judgment described as about 15 assault-causing-harm charges. He attended his trial and sentencing. His sentence was reduced on appeal to 10 years; he was absent from that appeal but was aware of it and represented by a lawyer.
In 2004, after serving part of the sentence, he was conditionally released, with about 11 months remaining. Conditions included probation supervision and notifying his probation officer of any change of address. He left Poland for Ireland in July 2006. The judgment says he failed to comply with the release conditions. A Polish court revoked his conditional release in December 2006, making him liable to serve the remaining sentence. The judgment records that authorities could not locate him to notify him of the intended revocation hearing.
Poland issued the warrant in December 2009. It identified the original 1998 sentence, as reduced on appeal, as the decision on which the warrant was based. The Polish authority did not complete the warrant’s section for in absentia cases.
Lipinski argued that the amended section 45 covered any proceedings leading to imprisonment, including the revocation hearing, and that the warrant was therefore incomplete. The Minister argued that revocation enforced a sentence already imposed; it did not impose a new sentence. The appeal also raised fair-trial arguments under the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU Charter. The Court of Appeal said the trial judge’s conclusion on those arguments was outside the certified question on appeal and did not reconsider it.
The court held that section 45 concerns absence from the proceedings resulting in the sentence or detention order specified in the warrant. Since Lipinski had been present at trial and sentencing, and the revocation order enforced rather than imposed the sentence, section 45 was not engaged. It upheld the High Court’s surrender order and dismissed the appeal.