A Supreme Court judgment on a European arrest warrant appeal turned on how the requesting state described the offences and the sentence still to be served. In a separate judgment dated 31 July 2008, Mr Justice Geoghegan said the information before the Irish court did not permit it to determine whether the statutory requirements in section 38 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 were met.
Geoghegan said he agreed with Chief Justice Murray on whether the second alternative in section 38(1)(b) was workable. Although courts should try to give legislation an operative meaning, he concluded that this alternative could not be applied, particularly because the Act had to be interpreted in light of the relevant European Framework Decision.
He said the Irish provision referred to an offence consisting of conduct specified in Article 2(2) of the Framework Decision, but that article listed offences rather than categories of conduct. Where the requesting state considered an offence to fall within that list, it had to provide that information by ticking the relevant box on the warrant. Geoghegan said Irish courts could not decide which conduct amounted to criminal offences under Lithuanian law. Without correspondence between offences in the traditional sense, extradition could not proceed unless the appropriate box had been ticked.
Geoghegan also addressed a subsidiary argument about sentencing. He said it might initially appear that the sentence remaining to be served was the same sentence for each of three offences, to run concurrently. But he considered that inference unjustified because the Lithuanian authorities had described it as a combined sentence. On the information provided, he said, the court could not determine whether section 38’s conditions were met.
The source is Geoghegan’s judgment, which says it is substantially to the same effect as judgments by the Chief Justice and Macken J. It does not set out the Supreme Court’s operative order or the ultimate disposition of the appeal. Geoghegan said he was otherwise in complete agreement with both judgments.