Tifrac v Romanian Judicial Authority

Supplementary information may remedy omissions in a European arrest warrant where the warrant is substantially complete and the omission is a lacuna. The court must obtain or consider further information before treating the warrant as invalid. That duty does not apply where the warrant represents a wholesale failure to provide the required particulars. The distinction is fact-sensitive. The concepts of formal and substantive defects do not provide a useful general test. An overlap between aggregated sentences in separate warrants is not, without more, double jeopardy under section 12 of the Extradition Act 2003, particularly where the requested person can raise the issue through the issuing state’s sentence-unification procedure.

The appellant challenged the Deputy Chief Magistrate’s order of 12 September 2017 for his extradition to Romania on two conviction European arrest warrants. He argued that the warrants were invalid because particulars were omitted for four offences whose sentences had been aggregated into the sentences identified in the warrants. He also argued that the aggregation created double jeopardy because the same smuggling sentences appeared in both warrants.

The Romanian Judicial Authority supplied further information describing the omitted offences and explaining that the sentences could be united after extradition. The central issues were whether the omissions were remediable by supplementary information, whether the overlapping sentence aggregation engaged section 12 of the Extradition Act 2003, and whether extradition would breach article 8 ECHR.

1. Appeal dismissed. Permission to appeal was granted, but neither ground succeeded.
2. Under the Extradition Act 2003, section 2(6)(b), the warrants were required to contain particulars of the circumstances of the offences contributing to the aggregated sentences. The warrants were defective because those particulars were absent. The question was whether the defect was a remediable lacuna or a wholesale failure.
3. The court applied the approach in Criminal proceedings against Bob-Dogi [2016] 1 WLR 4583, as explained in Goluchowski v District Court in Elblag, Poland [2016] UKSC 36 and Alexander v Public Prosecutor’s Office, Marseille District Court of First Instance, France [2017] EWHC 1392 (Admin). The executing court must enquire about missing required information before refusing to execute the warrant. Supplementary information may fill lacunae, including missing required matters, but cannot save a warrant amounting to a wholesale failure to provide the necessary particulars.
4. The omission here was on the remediable side of that distinction. The warrants identified the principal offences, the aggregated sentences, their duration and the decisions creating the aggregation. The further information supplied sufficient particulars of the smuggling offences. The defect was materially different from that in M and Others v Preliminary Investigation Tribunal of Napoli, Italy [2018] EWHC 1808 (Admin), where the warrants failed fundamentally to identify the offences for which the appellants were wanted.
5. The formal-versus-substantive distinction was rejected as an unhelpful analytical tool. The relevant inquiry concerns what information is missing and whether the failure is wholesale.
6. The overlapping aggregation did not constitute double jeopardy under section 12. The appellant had not served the smuggling sentences, and the overlap could be addressed through the Romanian procedure for uniting the sentences. The court trusted that process to remove double counting. Article 8 was not pursued and was, in any event, hopeless.

• High Court (Administrative Court): Permission to appeal was granted, but the appeal against the Deputy Chief Magistrate’s decision was dismissed.
• Westminster Magistrates’ Court: On 12 September 2017, the Deputy Chief Magistrate ordered extradition to Romania on two conviction European arrest warrants.