Mila, R (on the application of) v District Court of Czestochowa Poland

In an extradition appeal, the requested person cannot use the extradition proceedings to challenge whether the foreign sentence was properly activated or whether the conditions of its suspension were breached. That issue must be raised in the requesting state. Extradition will not be refused on medical or human-rights grounds unless the evidence establishes a sufficiently serious inadequacy in the treatment available there. A separate damages claim against a United Kingdom public authority is not, without more, a ground for refusing extradition.

The claimant appealed against District Judge Tubbs’s decision of 7 November 2011 ordering his extradition to Poland to serve approximately eight months remaining of a sentence for robbery. He argued that he had not breached the conditions on which the balance of that sentence had been suspended. He also relied on medical needs arising from an alleged assault by a prison officer and wished to pursue a damages claim against the Prison Service. The central issues were whether those matters affected the propriety of extradition and whether they engaged human-rights grounds for refusing it.

1. Appeal dismissed. The information supplied by Poland indicated that the claimant’s assertion that he had not breached the conditions of the suspended sentence was untrue. In any event, the Administrative Court could not investigate that issue in the extradition appeal. It was a matter for the claimant to raise in Poland and did not affect the propriety of extradition.
2. The medical evidence did not disclose a sufficiently serious medical situation to provide a basis for refusing extradition. Human-rights considerations were the only potentially relevant basis identified, but the evidence did not establish that treatment available in Poland, including in prison, was inadequate to the necessary degree.
3. The claimant’s proposed damages claim against the Prison Service was not a ground for refusing extradition. If he wished to pursue it, he would have to do so from abroad.
4. If extradition took place, deportation need not be pursued. Any separate difficulty caused by an existing deportation order, including difficulty returning to the United Kingdom, was outside the matters the court could determine.

• District Court: On 7 November 2011, District Judge Tubbs ordered the claimant’s extradition to Poland to serve the balance of his sentence.
• High Court (Administrative Court): The appeal against that order was dismissed.