The High Court has refused an application to surrender Rafał Klubikowski to Poland under a European arrest warrant, holding that an earlier decision on the same offence bound the parties in the renewed proceedings.
Mr Justice Paul Burns delivered judgment on 27 April 2021. The warrant sought Mr Klubikowski’s surrender to serve the remaining three years, one month and two days of a four-year sentence imposed in 2011 for nine drug-related offences. He was arrested in Ireland in July 2019 after the warrant was endorsed by the High Court in March that year.
The dispute concerned one offence in the warrant: an allegation that Mr Klubikowski grew cannabis in an apartment in Gorzów Wielkopolski in January 2011. A previous Polish warrant had described what the parties accepted was, in substance, the same offence. In 2015, the High Court refused surrender for that offence, finding no correspondence between it and an offence under Irish law. The court’s reasoning at the time turned on the English translation’s reference to “hemp” rather than cannabis.
The Minister for Justice argued that the current warrant’s description showed the offence could correspond to cultivation of cannabis under Irish law, and that the court could reconsider the issue because the earlier translation may have been wrong. The respondent argued that the earlier finding was binding between the same parties.
Mr Justice Burns said the 2015 decision addressed a substantive issue, was not appealed, and was not based on a technical defect in the warrant. Applying the reasoning in other surrender cases, he concluded that Mr Klubikowski was entitled to the benefit of that determination, whether as an issue estoppel or an accrued right. The possibility that the earlier decision rested on a mistranslation did not remove that benefit. The court therefore refused the surrender application.
The judge also addressed the separate objection based on the rule of specialty, which limits prosecution for offences beyond those covered by a surrender. He was not satisfied that Polish authorities had breached the rule by prosecuting the respondent for the offence: their actions had not yet deprived him of his liberty for it. The judge considered the current warrant could be treated as a request for consent to do so. He concluded that surrender was not precluded on that separate ground; it did not alter the refusal based on the earlier correspondence finding.