The High Court ordered the surrender of Maciej Wawrzyniak to Poland under a European arrest warrant so he can serve a two-year prison sentence imposed there in 2004. The court also ordered his committal to prison pending implementation of the surrender.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Michael Peart on 30 July 2009, records that the warrant was issued in Poland on 14 February 2007 and endorsed for execution in Ireland on 17 April 2007. Wawrzyniak was arrested on 4 May 2007. The judgment says the later delay followed his failure to appear in court, after which a bench warrant was issued and he was arrested again.
The Polish sentence covered two offences: “tormenting and causing light bodily harm” and rape. The court was told that separate sentences of 10 months and 18 months had been combined into an aggregate two-year term. Defence counsel argued that the court could not establish how much of the aggregate sentence related to each offence if correspondence with Irish law could not be shown for one of them.
Justice Peart found that the acts described in the warrant for the “tormenting” offence, including hitting the respondent’s spouse and using offensive language, would be recognisable as criminal acts under Irish law. He concluded that correspondence was established with assault causing harm under section 3 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. He therefore did not need to decide the objection based on the aggregate sentence.
The judgment describes the second offence as rape and notes that the warrant marked it as an offence for which correspondence or double criminality did not need to be verified. The court also rejected an argument that Ireland’s legislation failed to implement a European Union requirement concerning transmission of custody details and credit for time spent in detention. Justice Peart said he had rejected that argument in an earlier case and saw no reason to reach a different conclusion here.
The court said it found no statutory or other bar to surrender under the provisions considered. The order was for surrender under section 16(1) of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003, as amended. The judgment does not record that the surrender had already taken place.