The High Court has ordered Pawel Surma’s surrender to Poland to serve an eight-month sentence for three offences against military discipline, after receiving additional information about the trial that led to his conviction.
Mr Justice Edwards ruled on 3 December 2013 that changes made in 2012 to Ireland’s European arrest warrant legislation applied to warrants already issued and endorsed before those changes took effect. He found that the updated information supplied by the Polish judicial authority satisfied the amended rules in Mr Surma’s case.
The Polish warrant, dated 20 November 2007, sought Mr Surma’s surrender to serve a sentence imposed by the Military Garrison Court in Warsaw on 5 October 2004. It was endorsed for execution in Ireland on 1 May 2012 and executed on 10 December 2012. Mr Surma did not consent to surrender.
He challenged surrender on two broad grounds. The court had already rejected, in an earlier oral ruling, his argument that the offences did not correspond to offences under Irish law. The remaining dispute concerned whether 2012 amendments to the European Arrest Warrant Act applied retrospectively and, if so, whether the warrant contained the information then required for a conviction following a trial in his absence.
The amendments, which transposed updated EU rules, require an arrest warrant to state whether the person appeared at trial and, if not, to provide specified information about notice, representation or access to a retrial or appeal. Mr Surma argued that the rules applied to his earlier warrant and that its original form did not meet the new requirements. The Minister for Justice argued that the amendments applied only to warrants endorsed after 24 July 2012.
The judge held that the changes were procedural and applied to surrender proceedings still pending when the amendments took effect. He said the original warrant could be read together with later information from the issuing authority. That additional information, dated 2 August 2013, included a completed section of the updated warrant form certifying that Mr Surma had been summoned in person on 13 September 2004, informed of the trial’s date and place, and told that a decision could be made if he did not attend.
Reading the documents together, the court was satisfied that the amended statutory requirement had been met. It also found that the other legal requirements for surrender were satisfied and ordered Mr Surma’s surrender to a person authorised by Poland to receive him. The ruling addressed the statutory requirements for surrender; it did not determine the underlying Polish offences anew.