The High Court has ordered Pranas Garbenis’s surrender to Lithuania to face prosecution for two alleged sexual offences involving a girl under 16.
In a judgment delivered on 17 June 2024, Mr Justice David Keane directed surrender under section 16(1) of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. The order is for Mr Garbenis to be surrendered to a person authorised by Lithuania to receive him. The judgment concerns a request for surrender to prosecute; it does not determine guilt.
The European Arrest Warrant, issued on 25 January 2024, alleges that Mr Garbenis had sexual intercourse with the girl on at least five occasions during a period between November 2021 and May 2022, and sexually exploited her on dates between December 2021 and March 2022. The judgment describes the second allegation as involving telephone conversations in which he allegedly invited her to engage in sexual activities. The alleged conduct is set out in the warrant; it was not a finding that the offences occurred.
Mr Garbenis challenged whether the alleged conduct corresponded to offences under Irish law and argued that the Lithuanian Prosecutor General was not an issuing judicial authority. The correspondence objection was not pursued at the hearing, but the judge considered it as part of the court’s statutory duty. He accepted the Minister for Justice’s submissions that the alleged acts would correspond to child defilement and sexual exploitation offences under Irish law, and found that surrender could not be refused on that ground.
On the authority objection, the judge applied a binding Court of Justice of the European Union ruling and Irish decisions concerning Lithuania’s Prosecutor General. He noted that no countervailing evidence had been produced to support the claim that the position had changed, and rejected the objection.
The judge was satisfied that the warrant was endorsed, that Mr Garbenis was the person sought, and that the offences had not yet been tried. He also found that no statutory bar to surrender applied. The order followed from the statutory obligation to surrender. The judgment does not state whether or when the transfer took place.