The High Court ordered the surrender of Piotr Skowronski to Poland after rejecting his two remaining objections to a European arrest warrant. The order was made under section 16(1) of the European Arrest Warrant Act, as amended.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Michael Peart on 31 October 2006, records that the warrant was dated 29 November 2005, received in Ireland on 4 August 2006 and endorsed for execution on 8 August. Skowronski was arrested on 21 August and remanded in custody pending the hearing on 27 October.
The court said there was no dispute about Skowronski’s identity or the formalities of his arrest, and that the sentence imposed in Poland was not imposed in his absence. It found no statutory or Framework Decision ground requiring refusal of surrender. The offences were within categories for which double criminality did not have to be verified and met the required minimum gravity.
One objection concerned delay. Counsel argued that Poland had not sent the warrant to Ireland promptly after issuing it. The judge noted that the amended objection had instead identified the period between the warrant’s receipt in Ireland and Skowronski’s arrest. He said there was no prescribed time limit governing the period from issue to execution and no evidence of prejudice. The objection was rejected.
The other objection said the warrant was unclear about whether the three-and-a-half-year sentence covered one offence or both, and how much of it remained to be served. The judge found the prescribed form required the length of the custodial sentence and the remaining term, not a division of the sentence between offences. He also noted that Skowronski had been present when the Polish sentence was imposed. This objection was rejected too.
The judgment sharply criticised the way the objections had been drafted. Of six original grounds and seven in the amended document, five were abandoned before the hearing. The judge said general and unsupported objections had required unnecessary preparation and could waste court time and public funds. He indicated that future cases could involve closer scrutiny of objections and the need for publicly funded counsel.
Although he left the existing recommendation for two counsel in place, the judge excluded from it any fees for drafting the original and amended objections, finding they had served no useful purpose.