The High Court ordered the surrender of Jaroslaw Stanzak to Poland under a European arrest warrant, after finding that the facts for the tenth offence in a Polish sentence corresponded to an offence under Irish law.
Mr Justice Michael Peart delivered the judgment on 26 February 2010. The warrant, dated 23 July 2008, sought Stanzak’s surrender to serve the remaining two years and 24 days of a single two-and-a-half-year sentence imposed by a Polish court on 23 April 2001 for 10 offences.
The court said four offences had been designated as racketeering and extortion offences under the European arrest warrant framework, so double criminality did not need to be established for them. It found that five other offences corresponded to unlawful taking of a motor vehicle under section 112 of the Road Traffic Act 1961, as amended. The disputed issue was whether the tenth offence also had a corresponding offence in Ireland.
That offence concerned hiding an identity card belonging to the owner of a stolen car. The warrant described the car as having been taken in Olsztyn on 8 November 2000. It also described a demand for PLN 5,000 for its return and the concealment of the owner’s identity card in a flat’s cellar on Turkowskiego Street.
The issuing authority’s additional information said the respondent had taken the card from one of the cars he stole, but did not intend to appropriate it. Under the Polish offence, hiding a document meant making it unavailable to people entitled to use it; knowledge that it had previously been stolen or forged was not required.
For the applicant, Emily Farrell BL argued that the facts corresponded to possession of stolen property under section 18 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001. She relied on the provision that “stolen property” includes property unlawfully obtained otherwise than by stealing. Remy Farrell BL, for the respondent, argued that the additional information undermined correspondence because the Polish offence was hiding the card, not stealing it.
Justice Peart considered offences eight, nine and ten together. He concluded that the facts showed the card had been unlawfully obtained from the stolen car and that this was enough to correspond to an Irish offence, even though the Irish offence did not include hiding the document. He said correspondence did not require the same offence, provided the facts in the warrant disclosed an offence under Irish law.
The judge found the requirements of section 16 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003, as amended, were fulfilled and ordered surrender. He noted that because Poland had imposed one composite sentence for all 10 offences, and no part of it could be attributed solely to offence ten, the court could not order surrender if that offence lacked correspondence. Having found correspondence, he made the surrender order.