The High Court ordered the surrender of Edvinas Balciunas to Lithuania under a European arrest warrant, rejecting an objection that it was unclear whether a decision to prosecute him had been made.
The warrant was issued in Lithuania on 8 August 2006. The High Court endorsed it for execution on 21 November 2006, and Balciunas was arrested on 6 December. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform then applied for an order surrendering him.
The respondent did not contest that he was the person named in the warrant. The court also recorded no dispute about correspondence between the alleged offence and Irish law, and said the offence was among those for which double criminality did not have to be verified. The minimum gravity requirement was met.
The only objection relied on section 21A of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. Counsel for Balciunas argued that the warrant did not make clear that a decision had been taken to prosecute and that surrender might instead be sought to continue investigations. Section 21A presumes a decision to charge and try a person unless the contrary is proved.
The warrant stated that Lithuania’s Prosecutor General sought Balciunas’s arrest and surrender “for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution”. It also included text saying that, within 48 hours of surrender, he would be brought before a pre-trial judge to determine whether there were grounds for his arrest. The court noted that the paragraph containing this text was marked “not relevant” because the case did not concern a conviction in absentia.
Justice Michael Peart said the wording about a pre-trial judge did not rebut the statutory presumption. He considered it related to procedures following surrender in cases involving an in-absentia conviction and said translation differences could explain the apparent ambiguity. To displace the presumption, he said, the respondent would at least need evidence from a Lithuanian lawyer about the procedure and proof that Lithuanian law did not regard a decision to prosecute as having been made at the stage the warrant issued.
The court found no bar to surrender under sections 21A, 22, 23 or 24 of the Act, or under Part III of the Act or the Framework Decision. It therefore made the surrender order. The judgment addressed the prosecution-stage objection; it did not decide the underlying alleged offence.