The High Court ordered the surrender of a man to Lithuania under a European arrest warrant seeking his prosecution for two alleged offences. Mr Justice Michael Peart ruled that the warrant’s description of the stabbing offence in two sections did not prohibit surrender.
The judgment, delivered on 28 January 2009, concerned a warrant issued in Lithuania on 4 April 2008 and endorsed in Ireland before the respondent’s arrest on 16 June 2008. The respondent was remanded in custody pending the hearing. His identity was not disputed, and the judge said affidavit evidence satisfied him that the arrested man was the person named in the warrant.
The warrant described one alleged offence as a public order violation and the other as stabbing two people with a knife, causing serious injuries. Both were said to have occurred on 18 December 2005. The Lithuanian authority marked the stabbing allegation as an Article 2.2 “grievous bodily harm” offence, but also included the description “serious health impairment” in a section for offences not covered by that category.
For the respondent, Conor Bowman BL argued that this was contradictory and that surrender should be prohibited. The Minister’s counsel, Remy Farrell BL, submitted that the two entries were not mutually exclusive, though including the offence in the latter section meant correspondence with an Irish offence had to be established. He argued that the alleged stabbing conduct would correspond to an offence under section 3 or 4 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, and that the public order allegation corresponded to an offence under section 6 of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994.
The judge accepted that those were corresponding offences. He was not satisfied that the warrant’s completion amounted to an error prohibiting surrender. He said the issuing authority could more correctly have either marked the stabbing allegation as an Article 2.2 offence alone or included it in the other section without marking it as Article 2.2.
Having found that the requirements of section 16(1) of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003, as amended, were met, the judge said the court was required to make the surrender order. The ruling addressed the warrant’s completion and the correspondence issue; it did not determine the respondent’s guilt on either allegation.