The High Court has ordered the surrender of Danas Kairys to Lithuania under a European arrest warrant, rejecting his objections based on prison conditions, family circumstances and EU law.
In a judgment delivered on 31 January 2022, Mr Justice Paul Burns said the warrant sought Kairys’s surrender to enforce a sentence of three years and seven months’ imprisonment. The sentence was imposed in April 2015 and upheld on appeal in June 2015; the judgment said three years, six months and 28 days remained to be served.
The court found that Kairys was the person named in the warrant and that the legal requirements for surrender were met. The warrant listed 13 offences. The judge accepted the issuing authority’s certification that one offence concerned illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances. He also found that the other offences corresponded to offences under Irish law, including theft, criminal damage, perjury or perverting the course of justice, and assault. Correspondence was not contested.
Kairys argued that surrender would expose him to a real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment in Lithuanian prisons. In an affidavit, he said he had left Lithuania in 2014 because he feared physical and sexual assault in prison. He relied on reports about prison conditions. The judge said those reports raised no new issue compared with material considered in earlier cases, and found that Kairys had not established grounds for an inquiry into the conditions he would face. The court was not satisfied there were substantial grounds to believe surrender would breach his fundamental rights.
On family life, Kairys said he had formed a family unit in Ireland with his partner, Samata Beinarauskite, and that they had two young children. The judge accepted that a family unit had been established but found the circumstances fell short of the exceptional threshold required to prevent surrender. The court rejected this objection as well.
Kairys also argued that Ireland’s failure to implement an EU framework decision allowing some people to serve a sentence in the state handling their arrest warrant breached his rights. The judge said Ireland was not obliged to adopt the relevant optional provisions and rejected the argument that refusing local service violated human dignity. He declined to refer a question about the framework decision to the Court of Justice of the European Union, finding the applicable law clear.
Having rejected the objections, the High Court ordered Kairys’s surrender to Lithuania.