The Court of Appeal has allowed Zsolt Siklósi’s appeal against an order for his surrender to Hungary, discharged that order and dismissed the proceedings. Its reasons were delivered by Mr Justice Maurice Collins on 9 June 2023, following an order made on 24 May.
Hungary sought Mr Siklósi’s surrender to serve the remaining part of a one-year prison sentence imposed for offences committed in August 2005. The sentence had initially been suspended. After a later conviction for a child support offence allegedly committed in 2008, the suspended sentence was ordered to be enforced. The effective sentence, including that enforcement order, was imposed in his absence by the Miskolc Court of Appeal in June 2012.
A 2012 European Arrest Warrant sought his surrender for both sets of offences. The High Court refused surrender in 2015. A second warrant, issued on 27 July 2017, sought surrender for the 2005 offences alone. In 2020, the High Court ordered surrender. Mr Siklósi appealed, and the Court of Appeal referred issues about his right to attend the trial to the Court of Justice of the European Union. After that court ruled on the referred cases in March 2023, the Minister for Justice asked the Court of Appeal to seek further information from Hungary. Mr Siklósi opposed that request.
The Court of Appeal said the Minister did not contend that the material already before the court established that the relevant conditions for surrender were met, or that surrender would not breach Mr Siklósi’s rights of defence. The court concluded that it did not need to seek more information or send the case back to the High Court for that purpose.
The warrant itself indicated that the sentence became statute-barred on 27 July 2022. The Minister accepted that, if so, Mr Siklósi could not be surrendered, but sought confirmation from the Hungarian authority. The court saw no reason to go behind the warrant’s stated position. It also noted that the parties agreed custody during the proceedings had accounted for virtually all the sentence; estimates of the remaining time ranged from about 10 days to as much as four weeks.
The court also cited the age of the offences and sentence, the fact that this was the second warrant concerning the 2005 offences, the speculative nature of any claim that Mr Siklósi had waived his right to attend the 2012 hearing, and seven previous requests for further information. It said that, in these circumstances, the proper order was to allow the appeal, discharge the High Court’s surrender order and dismiss the proceedings.