The High Court has ordered the surrender of Deividas Jarokovas to Lithuania under a European arrest warrant, after rejecting his objections concerning the sentence he faces and the risk of ill-treatment in prison.
In a judgment delivered on 16 April 2021, Mr Justice Paul Burns said the warrant sought Jarokovas’s surrender to serve a 16-month sentence, of which one year, three months and 29 days remained. The sentence was imposed in December 2017 for three offences and suspended for two years subject to conditions. It was activated in August 2019 after the conditions were not met.
Jarokovas argued that the minimum-gravity threshold was not met for the first offence because the original penalty for it was three months’ imprisonment. The court found that the penalties had been merged into one composite sentence, which could no longer be divided into separate terms. The 16-month sentence therefore applied to each offence for the threshold, and the remaining term also exceeded four months. The judge dismissed this objection.
The court also rejected an objection that the warrant lacked clarity about the sentence and the August 2019 hearing. Jarokovas accepted he had attended the earlier hearings but said he had not received notice of the hearing that activated the sentence. The judge found that the activation followed a failure to comply with suspension conditions and did not change the nature or length of the original sentence. Applying the European Court of Justice ruling in Ardic, the judge held that the activation hearing was not a trial resulting in the decision for the purposes of the in-absentia rules in the European Arrest Warrant Act. Those requirements did not have to be met before surrender. The judge was satisfied that Jarokovas’s defence rights had been respected and that no relevant lack of clarity had caused or would cause injustice or prejudice.
On prison conditions, the court considered a 2019 report by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture that criticised inter-prisoner violence and intimidation in Lithuanian prisons. Lithuanian authorities told the court that measures had been introduced, including isolating influential inmates, deploying extra warders and requiring guards to use body-worn cameras when interacting with prisoners. They could not identify the particular prison where Jarokovas would be held.
The judge found no substantial grounds to believe surrender would expose Jarokovas to a real risk of a fundamental-rights breach. He concluded that surrender was not incompatible with Ireland’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights or the Constitution, and ordered surrender under section 16(1) of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003.