The High Court has refused an application to surrender a respondent to Poland, ruling that one of four offences in the European arrest warrant did not correspond to an offence under Irish law and that the sentence could not be separated by offence.
Mr Justice Paul Burns delivered the judgment on 16 March 2021. The Minister for Justice and Equality sought the respondent’s surrender to serve the remaining one year and three months of a two-year-and-three-month prison sentence imposed in Poland in 2005. The warrant was issued in 2011 and amended in 2020. The respondent was arrested and brought before the High Court in January 2021.
The sentence covered four offences: breaking into a motor vehicle and taking a radio; taking another person’s identity card and other documents to obtain cash; hiding another person’s school ID; and taking a bicycle that had been entrusted to the respondent.
The court found that Irish-law correspondence was established for the first, second and fourth offences. For the fourth, the issuing authority had certified that the offence met the statutory threshold for dispensing with a separate correspondence inquiry; the judge also said correspondence could be established if it were necessary to consider it.
The third offence concerned hiding a school ID in Wrocław on 4 August 1999. The Minister’s counsel argued that the acts could correspond to theft under Irish law, even though the warrant did not expressly say the respondent acted dishonestly, appropriated the ID without consent or intended to deprive its owner of it.
Justice Burns rejected that argument. He said simply hiding another person’s document did not amount to theft unless the required dishonest appropriation and intention to permanently deprive the owner were present. The warrant said the ID was hidden, but did not say it was appropriated or indicate an intention to permanently deprive its owner. The judge said it would not be fair or reasonable to infer those matters from the information provided.
The court therefore found no correspondence for the school ID offence and refused surrender in respect of it. As the Polish sentence was an aggregate sentence covering all four offences, with no particular term attributable to any one offence, the court said surrender had to be refused unless correspondence was established for every offence. It made an order refusing surrender.