The High Court prohibited the surrender of M.V. to Lithuania, finding that the minister who issued the European arrest warrant was not a judicial authority in the circumstances of the case. The court held that the Prison Department, an executive agency, had requested the warrant and that no judicial body had first decided to seek it.
The Minister for Justice and Equality had sought M.V.’s surrender to serve the remaining two years, three months and 18 days of a five-and-a-half-year sentence for rape. The warrant was issued in September 2007 by Lithuania’s justice minister. The High Court heard the matter under section 16 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003.
M.V. argued that the warrant was invalid because it had been issued by a minister at the request of the Prison Department. The Minister relied on an earlier Irish High Court decision concerning a Lithuanian justice minister and argued that the Lithuanian designation should be accepted. The court said that the Supreme Court’s later decision in *McArdle and Brunnell* allowed a respondent to raise cogent grounds challenging whether a designated issuing authority was judicial in the meaning of the Act and the European Arrest Warrant Framework Decision.
The judge noted that information from Lithuanian authorities confirmed the warrant followed a Prison Department request. The court said that the department was an executive agency and the minister was part of the executive. Because no court or other judicial authority had decided to request the warrant, the process involved no judicial decision for the minister to endorse. The judge concluded that judicial involvement was a prerequisite in these circumstances and that the minister did not qualify as an issuing judicial authority.
The court separately rejected M.V.’s claims about prison conditions, delay and family life. It found no substantial grounds to believe surrender would expose him to inhuman or degrading treatment, including through overcrowding, sanitation or inter-prisoner violence. It also found that surrender would not disproportionately interfere with his private and family life, and that the delay objection did not prohibit surrender. The court concluded that he had fled Lithuania to avoid serving the remainder of his sentence.
The prohibition rested solely on the issuing-authority ground. The court rejected M.V.’s other objections; it did not order his surrender.