The High Court refused an order to surrender Mantas Vestartas to Lithuania under a European Arrest Warrant, finding that surrender would disproportionately interfere with his and his children’s Article 8 rights. The decision followed a hearing on his objections under section 16 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003.
Lithuania sought Vestartas’s return to serve the remaining two years, five months and 26 days of a five-year, eight-month composite prison sentence. The sentence covered 43 offences committed between 2003 and 2005, when he was aged 14 to 15. He had served about three years before being released on parole in 2009. His parole was revoked in 2011 after he breached its conditions, and he left Lithuania before the remaining sentence began.
Justice Hunt found that all 43 offences corresponded to offences under Irish law, so there was no bar to surrender on that ground. The dispute centred on Vestartas’s objection that surrender would breach section 37, including his rights to private and family life. The court accepted affidavit evidence that he had lived in Ireland for about five years with his partner and two children, both Irish citizens, and had worked in construction. The Minister had not challenged that evidence.
The judge considered that the public interest in surrender was reduced because the request was to enforce the balance of a sentence after parole, rather than to prosecute Vestartas or begin a sentence. He also took account of the fact that the parole breach did not involve new offending, and of evidence that Vestartas had led a generally responsible life in Ireland.
The judgment identified unexplained gaps in the Lithuanian authorities’ actions. They located Vestartas in Ireland in 2013, but the warrant relied on was issued in December 2016 and was not sent to Ireland until April 2018. The authorities’ response to a request for an explanation did not explain the delay, particularly the 16 months between issuing the warrant and transmitting it. The judge said this weakened the public interest in surrender.
Balancing that interest against the family circumstances, the judge gave particular weight to the likely effect on the youngest child of losing her father’s care and support for nearly three years. He upheld the section 37 objection and ordered that surrender be refused.
In an addendum delivered on 27 May 2019, the judge declined the Minister’s application for a certificate permitting an appeal. He concluded that the proposed grounds did not raise a point of law of exceptional public importance. He described the refusal as dependent on an unusual combination of case-specific factors and said it should not have significant precedential value.