The High Court ordered the surrender of a man to Poland under a European Arrest Warrant, rejecting his objections based on delay, family life and the revocation of a suspended sentence.
Mr Justice Binchy delivered judgment on 22 November 2019. The application concerned a 10-month prison sentence imposed in 2002 by the Regional Court in Hrubieszów. The warrant said the man had persuaded his brother to bring at least 39.25 grams of cannabis into Poland in July 1999. The court recorded that he had appeared at the trial resulting in the original sentence.
The sentence was conditionally suspended for three years. According to the warrant, it was later activated after the man was convicted of another offence in January 2006. He did not voluntarily report to serve the sentence, and an arrest warrant followed. The judgment noted an apparent year error in the warrant’s account of when the original sentence became legally valid; the judge said nothing of significance turned on it.
The man argued that surrender would be disproportionate after the passage of more than 20 years since the offence and would harm his family life. His solicitor’s affidavit said he had lived in Ireland since 2005, worked in Carrickmacross, and had an eight-year-old son who stayed with him at weekends. The court found that the family impact described was the ordinary consequence of surrender, and that the child was not unusually dependent on his father. It weighed that impact against the public interest in enforcing a sentence for a drug offence, which it said could not be regarded as trivial.
The judgment also considered an earlier European Arrest Warrant. The High Court had ordered surrender under that warrant, but the Court of Appeal overturned the order in 2015 because the warrant lacked information required by section 45 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. The current application concerned a different offence. The judge rejected the argument that the issuing authority’s delay in bringing the new application justified refusal. Delay alone, he said, was not a ground to refuse surrender, and the other relevant factors in this case did not warrant refusal.
The court also rejected the section 45 objection. It held that the later proceedings revoking the suspension did not change the nature or level of the original sentence, so they did not bring the case within the relevant rule for trials in the person’s absence. Other objections, including the claim that the offence did not correspond to an Irish offence and the speciality objection, were not pursued. The order was for surrender to serve the Polish sentence; the judgment did not determine the outcome of the separate offence that led to the sentence being activated.