Horvath v Municipal Court in Prague (Czech Republic)

On an extradition appeal involving very old offences, the court must conduct a careful proportionality balancing exercise. Relevant factors include the time since the offences, the proportion of the sentence already served, and the effect of extradition on established private and family life. Delay may reduce the weight of the public interest in extradition while increasing the interference with private and family life. An appellate court may intervene only where the lower court ought to have reached a different decision and, on that basis, would have been required to order discharge. A different view of the balance is insufficient unless the decision was wrong or unsupportable.

The applicant appealed against an extradition order made by the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 19 February 2019. The Czech authorities sought his extradition to enforce the unserved balance of a six-year sentence imposed in 1998 for fraud and attempted fraud involving forged banknotes.

The offences were more than 21 years old. The applicant had served almost five years of the sentence and had lived in England with his partner and children for about a decade. The central issues were whether the district judge had properly assessed delay, the sentence already served, and the impact of extradition on private and family life, and whether the statutory appellate threshold for intervention was met.

1. Appeal allowed. The extradition order was quashed and the applicant was discharged.
2. The court proceeded on the district judge’s conclusion that the applicant had been a fugitive from November 2007. That conclusion did not resolve the appeal, because the proportionality balancing exercise still required proper assessment.
3. The district judge’s balancing exercise contained two material omissions. He failed clearly to include the fact that the applicant had already served almost five years of the six-year sentence. He also failed to apply the guidance that delay since the crimes may reduce the weight of the public interest and increase the impact on private and family life, as stated by Baroness Hale in HH v Deputy Prosecutor of the Italian Republic, Genoa [2012] UKSC 25.
4. The relevant circumstances were the age of the offences, their relatively modest financial scale, the substantial sentence already served, and the applicant’s settled relationship, children, work and established family life in England. Taken together, those factors outweighed the factors supporting extradition.
5. Following the appellate guidance discussed in Celinski v Poland [2015] EWHC 124 (Admin), including the analysis drawn from Re B (a child) (FC) [2013] UKSC 33, it was insufficient for the appellate court merely to consider the district judge’s decision wrong on balance. Intervention was justified because the district judge ought to have decided the balancing question differently.
6. Section 27 of the Extradition Act 2003 required the further conclusion that, had the question been decided correctly, the district judge would have been required to order discharge. That condition was satisfied.

• Westminster Magistrates’ Court: District Judge Kenneth Grant made an extradition order on 19 February 2019.
• High Court (Administrative Court): Permission to appeal was granted on paper on 17 August 2019. The appeal was allowed; the extradition order was quashed and the applicant was discharged.