The High Court has rejected a man’s objections to his surrender to Poland under a European Arrest Warrant, finding that he knowingly waived his right to attend the trial that led to his conviction and suspended sentence.
In a judgment delivered on 21 May 2025, Mr Justice Patrick McGrath said the man had been tried and sentenced in his absence in March 2017. The Polish court imposed a one-year prison sentence, suspended on conditions. In November 2018, it ordered the sentence to be served after finding that he had not complied with probation requirements. He was also absent from that hearing and had not been notified of it.
The man argued that his defence rights had not been upheld because he did not receive notice of either hearing. The Minister for Justice sought his surrender to serve the sentence. The Minister accepted that the case did not meet the statutory conditions for surrender based on proof that the man had been notified of the 2017 trial. The court found that notices sent to his Polish address were not received after he had left and failed to give the authorities a new address.
The judge concluded that the man had been told during pre-trial proceedings to attend when summoned, update his address and that proceedings could continue in his absence if he failed to do so. He found a “manifest absence of diligence” and said the man had made an informed choice not to attend, aware that the trial could proceed without him. The court was therefore satisfied that his defence rights were not breached in the 2017 proceedings.
The judgment treated the 2018 hearing differently. It found that the Polish court had only activated the sentence imposed in 2017: it had not changed the sentence’s nature or length, imposed a new penalty, or acted because of a new offence. The judge said the later hearing was not ordinarily part of the “trial resulting in the decision” for the purposes of the applicable surrender rules. The absence of notice of that hearing did not, on these facts, breach the man’s rights.
The court dismissed the grounds of objection and said it intended to make a surrender order under section 16 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. The supplied judgment ends at that statement of intention; it does not record the making of the final order.