The High Court has refused an application to surrender Florin-Marius Pleşca to Romania to serve a two-year-and-ten-month prison sentence covering a series of road traffic and other offences.
Romanian authorities issued a European arrest warrant in January 2020 relating to 11 convictions. They included driving while disqualified, drink-driving, refusing a blood test, driving without a licence, assaults on police officers and allowing another person who had no licence to drive a vehicle.
The difficulty arose because Romania had combined the sentences for all of the offences into a single term. The Minister for Justice accepted that it was not possible to separate that sentence into individual components. Under Supreme Court authority, that meant every offence covered by the merged sentence had to correspond to an offence in Irish law before surrender could be ordered.
The High Court found that this requirement failed for the offence involving the unlicensed driver. Romanian authorities ultimately confirmed that Pleşca did not own the vehicle but was its lawful holder after borrowing it.
Irish legislation criminalises an owner permitting an unlicensed person to drive, but Mr Justice Burns found that Pleşca could not be treated as the owner under the relevant statutory definition. The Minister alternatively argued that the conduct could amount to a common-law conspiracy to drive without a licence.
The judge was not satisfied that such a conspiracy offence existed or would be prosecuted in Ireland in these circumstances. He cautioned against expanding criminal liability through an uncertain common-law offence simply to establish correspondence for a European arrest warrant.
Pleşca separately argued that Romanian prison conditions would expose him to inhuman or degrading treatment. The court rejected that ground after considering assurances that he would receive at least three square metres of personal space throughout his sentence and information concerning the prisons where he might be held.
Despite rejecting the prison-conditions challenge, the lack of correspondence on one offence meant the entire surrender application had to be refused.