The High Court has ordered the surrender of a man to Lithuania under a European arrest warrant, after rejecting objections concerning his conviction in absentia and the possibility of a lengthy delay before a retrial.
The man was convicted in Lithuania in June 2004 while absent from trial and sentenced to one year and 356 days in prison. The warrant said his sister had received notice of earlier court dates, but that a summons for the trial date had not been served because he could not be found.
The alleged conduct concerned a demand to recover a mobile phone or receive 400 Lithuanian litas for its loss. The warrant said the man threatened to take the victim to a forest and break his legs with an iron bar. The judge found that, if the conduct described had occurred in Ireland, it would amount to the offence of making a threat to cause harm under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. He also found that the sentence met the minimum gravity requirement for surrender in a case involving a conviction in absentia.
The man argued that Lithuania had not provided the undertaking required by section 45 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003, as amended, because its stated procedure was an appeal rather than a retrial. The Lithuanian authorities had described a right to appeal outside the usual time limit and said an appeal court must reinvestigate evidence underlying the conviction if the person challenges its assessment. The judge held that these guarantees were sufficient to provide an opportunity to be tried again in the person’s presence. He also noted that the man had not submitted evidence from a Lithuanian lawyer to rebut the statutory presumption that the issuing state would comply with the relevant requirements.
A separate objection concerned the possibility that the appeal or retrial might be delayed for many years if surrender were postponed while the man served a life sentence following a possible conviction on a murder charge in Ireland. The judge rejected that argument as speculative, saying the court could not assume that a later trial would be unfair. No murder conviction or life sentence had been established in this proceeding.
The court found that the person before it was the person named in the warrant, that the offence corresponded to an offence in Ireland, and that no statutory or other bar identified in the judgment prevented surrender. It ordered surrender under section 16(1). The judgment said the applicant would seek postponement of surrender under section 18(3); it did not make a postponement order.