The Supreme Court allowed Ivans Desjatnikovs’s appeal against a High Court order directing his surrender to Latvia on a European arrest warrant. It held that the warrant did not meet either of the legal routes for surrender considered in the appeal, and that Irish courts could not create a third route by classifying the alleged conduct themselves.
The warrant, issued in Riga on 7 December 2005, described allegations concerning money taken from the cash desk of pawnshop Omega and a separate 7,300-lat loan allegedly misappropriated from Natalija Iljina. It described the matter as one offence, but the Supreme Court said it was unclear which set of allegations that offence concerned. The court said its decision did not turn on that ambiguity.
The first possible route required the alleged conduct to correspond to an offence under Irish law. The Court affirmed the High Court’s conclusion that it did not: the warrant’s allegations did not include the dishonest intent required for the Irish offences of theft or fraud considered in the case.
The second route covered offences on the European arrest warrant’s list for which double criminality need not be shown. No listed offence was ticked on this warrant. The High Court had also reasoned that an Irish court could examine the described conduct and decide whether it fell within a listed category even without a tick. The Supreme Court rejected that interpretation of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003.
In its judgment delivered on 31 July 2008, the court said the issuing state had to identify a listed offence in the warrant. It held that the Act did not permit an Irish court to look behind the warrant and decide for itself that an offence under Latvian law belonged on the list. The court therefore allowed the appeal and concluded that no order could be made directing Desjatnikovs’s surrender on this warrant. The judgment did not determine the truth of the allegations in Latvia.