The High Court has ordered the surrender of Marton Gyozo Kis to Romania under a European arrest warrant, after dismissing his objections to surrender.
In a judgment delivered on 30 July 2020, Mr Justice Paul Burns said the warrant sought Kis’s surrender to serve a 15-year prison sentence imposed in Romania on 11 January 2011 for drug trafficking offences. The full sentence remained to be served. The court said Kis was arrested and brought before it on 29 February 2020. The warrant had been endorsed in 2012.
Kis argued that surrender was barred by section 37 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 because of a risk of inhuman or degrading treatment in Romanian prisons and interference with his private and family life. He also objected that the offences did not correspond to offences under Irish law and that he had been tried and sentenced in absentia.
On prison conditions, the judge said Kis had provided no report from a Romanian lawyer or other expert. The material relied on—a High Court decision and an executive summary of a Council of Europe committee report based on a 2018 visit—was neither specific nor sufficiently up to date, the court found. It ruled that the evidence did not meet the threshold for opening an inquiry into the risk he would face if surrendered.
Kis’s affidavit said he had lived openly in Ireland since 2001, denied involvement in the alleged offence, and lived with his partner and their two children. His counsel argued that the delay in executing the warrant made surrender an unjustified interference with family life. The applicant’s counsel relied on Garda evidence describing unsuccessful efforts over several years to locate him and said the delay was not culpable. The judge found no culpable delay and said the circumstances fell short of the exceptional level required to refuse surrender on that basis.
At the hearing, Kis’s counsel did not pursue the correspondence objection. The judge noted that the issuing authority had certified the offence as a qualifying drug-trafficking offence and said correspondence could be established if necessary.
Because Kis had been convicted in absentia, the Romanian authority supplied a revised section 45 table. It stated that he had been summoned, was represented by a court-appointed counsellor, and would be served with the decision after surrender and informed of a right to seek a retrial or appeal within 30 days. The judge found the statutory requirements met and dismissed that objection.
Having dismissed all objections, the High Court ordered Kis’s surrender to Romania under section 16(1) of the Act.