The High Court has ordered Polish national Jerzy Kiernowicz to be surrendered to Poland for prosecution on three allegations that he financially profited from prostitution in Poznan in 2004.
The European arrest warrant alleged that Kiernowicz acted with two other men and benefited financially from prostitution carried out by three women, one of whom was a minor. The allegations concerned periods between April and August 2004.
Polish authorities sought to treat the offence involving the minor as falling within the European arrest warrant category of sexual exploitation of children and child pornography. If validly invoked, that procedure removes the normal requirement to show that the alleged conduct would also constitute an offence in Ireland.
Ms Justice Deirdre Murphy found a problem with that certification. The list of offences reproduced in the warrant did not correspond with the official Article 2.2 list in the European Framework Decision. It even contained 33 entries instead of 32. The court held that this was a manifest error which could not be cured simply by later confirmation from the Polish issuing authority.
That did not end the surrender application. It meant instead that the Minister had to establish what is known as correspondence, or double criminality, for all three alleged offences.
Additional information from Poland stated that Kiernowicz owned an escort agency and that an investigation involving witness interviews and searches led prosecutors to allege that women working through the business were providing sexual services from which he and two others profited.
Kiernowicz denied the allegations in Poland and maintained that women employed in his club did not provide sexual services.
The High Court held that the alleged ownership and operation of the escort agency supplied the additional element necessary to correspond with the Irish offence of living on the earnings of prostitution while aiding and abetting it.
Correspondence was therefore established for all three counts, and the court proposed an order surrendering Kiernowicz to Poland for prosecution.