The Supreme Court has allowed an appeal by Saulius Ferenca and set aside a High Court order for his surrender to Lithuania, ruling that a single sentence imposed for three offences could not be divided to exclude one offence that did not meet the statutory surrender conditions.
The judgment, delivered by Chief Justice Murray on 31 July 2008, concerned a European Arrest Warrant seeking Ferenca’s surrender to serve a two-year-and-nine-month prison sentence imposed in Lithuania. The warrant sought surrender to serve the sentence, not for prosecution.
The High Court had found that two of the three offences corresponded to offences under Irish law. That finding was not challenged on appeal. It had also found that the first offence did not correspond to an Irish offence and was not directly covered by the specified list of offences for which surrender can proceed without checking correspondence. Those findings were also not in issue before the Supreme Court.
The first offence was described in the warrant as involving Ferenca receiving a payment card from another person and handing it to unidentified people to be forged. The High Court concluded that the conduct did not amount to the relevant Irish forgery offence. The issuing authority had not marked any of the warrant’s boxes identifying offences on the specified list.
The High Court nevertheless considered that the alleged conduct fell within a broad concept of fraud and could be treated as conduct covered by the statutory exception. The Supreme Court rejected that interpretation. It said the list named offences but did not itself specify the conduct that constitutes them; classification under the relevant law had to come from the issuing state. The Court concluded that the warrant provided no basis to treat the first offence as covered by that exception. It also said the statutory phrase about an offence consisting of conduct specified in the list could not have a meaningful effect in the circumstances.
Because the three offences attracted one composite sentence, the Court said it had no basis to apportion the two years and nine months between them. The sentence could not be separated from the first offence, for which surrender was barred under the applicable provision. The Court noted that the legislation allows partial surrender where requests for separate offences are severable, but found that was not the situation here.
The Supreme Court therefore allowed the appeal and set aside the High Court order. The judgment does not order surrender for the two offences that met the correspondence requirement.