The High Court refused to surrender a man to Poland under two European arrest warrants, finding that a seven-year delay in carrying out an earlier surrender order amounted to an abuse of the court’s process.
Mr Justice Paul Burns delivered the judgment on 30 April 2021. The warrants sought the man’s surrender for prosecution over alleged fraud offences. One concerned contracts for goods allegedly entered into without an intention to pay, between June 1995 and March 1998. The other concerned goods allegedly obtained by false pretences in August 1997.
The same warrants had been considered in earlier proceedings. In April 2012, the High Court ordered surrender, but Polish authorities did not collect the man within the statutory period. He was released from custody. The judgment’s account of subsequent correspondence records requests from Poland to extend the collection date, followed by years without effective follow-up. The man was arrested again in August 2019 after the warrants were retransmitted.
The judge found that the failure to complete surrender in 2012 appeared to stem from poor communication and coordination between Irish and Polish authorities. He said responsibility could not be placed on the man, who had lived openly in Ireland after his release and had not been told that another surrender attempt might follow.
The man objected to surrender on several grounds, including interference with private and family life and abuse of process. His adult son’s affidavit described severe bipolar disorder and reliance on his father as his sole support and carer. The son had spent six weeks as an inpatient at a psychiatric unit in 2019. The judgment also noted that the applicant conceded the alleged offending was not at the most serious level.
Justice Burns said the length of time since the alleged offences and the family circumstances would not, by themselves, justify refusing surrender. But he considered those matters alongside the unexplained seven-year delay after the 2012 order and the way both jurisdictions had handled the case. Taken cumulatively, the circumstances were exceptional and made surrender unjustifiable as an abuse of process. He clarified that this finding did not imply bad faith or an intention by authorities to oppress the man.
The court rejected the separate argument that surrender had to be refused because a Polish judicial authority had not reconsidered proportionality before retransmitting the warrants. It refused an order for surrender under each warrant.