State will not appeal refusal to surrender Ian Bailey to France

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The State will not appeal the High Court’s refusal to surrender Ian Bailey to France to serve a sentence for murder. The proceedings were reported on 27 October 2020.

Robert Barron SC, for the Minister for Justice, told Mr Justice Paul Burns that the State was not seeking a certificate to appeal the decision. The judge ordered that Bailey could recover the costs of two senior barristers, a junior barrister and a solicitor from the State.

Bailey denies involvement in the death of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, who was found dead outside her holiday home in Schull in December 1996. He was arrested twice but never charged in relation to her death.

In May 2019, a three-judge court in Paris convicted Bailey of her murder in his absence and imposed a 25-year prison sentence. He did not attend the French proceedings and had no legal representation there.

In his judgment on 12 October 2020, Mr Justice Burns ruled that surrender was precluded under section 44 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003. He found there was no reciprocity between French and Irish law on extraterritorial jurisdiction for murder in this case: the French basis was the alleged victim’s nationality, while the Irish basis would be the alleged perpetrator’s nationality or ordinary residence.