The High Court refused an application to surrender Nerijus Kondratevas to Lithuania, where he was to serve the remaining part of a combined prison sentence. The court held that it could not order surrender because the sentence covered two offences and could not be divided to identify the portion relating to an offence that corresponded to one under Irish law.
In a judgment delivered on 14 December 2006, Mr Justice Michael Peart considered an application by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform under a European arrest warrant issued in Lithuania on 2 August 2006. The warrant sought Kondratevas’s return to serve the balance of a sentence imposed there, rather than for prosecution and trial. The remaining term was stated to be two years, four months and 15 days, after credit for pre-trial detention.
The warrant listed two offences. One was described as racketeering and extortion. The other concerned the alleged acquisition, transport and keeping of 24.6 litres of denatured ethyl alcohol in Kaunas in April 2000. The applicant’s counsel accepted that the conduct alleged in relation to the alcohol would not constitute an offence in Ireland. The court was satisfied that this was so.
The Lithuanian warrant described the two years and six months’ imprisonment imposed on 27 August 2003 as a combined sentence for both offences, alongside a fine. It did not allocate any period of imprisonment to either offence. In response to a request for clarification, the Lithuanian Ministry of Justice said the sentence was imposed for both crimes and met the minimum gravity requirements of the European arrest warrant framework. Justice Peart concluded that this confirmed a single, undivided sentence.
Under section 38 of the Extradition Act, the court could not surrender a person for an offence unless it corresponded to an offence under Irish law, subject to specified conditions. Because the sentence could not be severed to identify a term attributable only to the other offence, the court refused surrender.
The judge made no determination on Kondratevas’s arguments about being sentenced in his absence or the absence of an undertaking from the Lithuanian authority under section 45. He made no finding on those issues, having refused surrender on the correspondence ground. The court’s order was to refuse the application.