Ioan Mailat v Hunedeora City Court (Romania)

For a conviction warrant under the Extradition Act 2003, the statutory requirement is to provide particulars of the conviction and sentence. The warrant need not contain every particular required for an accusation warrant.

Further information may cure incomplete particulars where the warrant is in the prescribed form, addresses the required information and provides enough detail to identify the basis of the request. The court must distinguish remediable lacunae from a wholesale failure to provide particulars. A warrant that is merely a blank document, or that wrongly attributes the entire sentence to one offence while omitting another offence altogether, cannot be cured in that way.

Romania sought the appellant’s surrender under an arrest warrant issued pursuant to Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA. The warrant related to two sentences: 18 months’ imprisonment for drink driving and 784 days remaining from an earlier sentence of eight years and six months.

The warrant gave particulars of the first sentence and identified the judgments, dates, courts and legal provisions associated with the second sentence, but did not particularise the underlying offences for which the second sentence had been imposed. Further information later supplied those details.

The District Judge held that the warrant and further information, read together, were sufficient. The issue on appeal was whether the warrant suffered from a wholesale failure of particularisation under section 2 of the Extradition Act 2003, so that further information could not remedy it.

1. The appeal was dismissed. The warrant was not invalid and the supplementary information could properly be relied upon.
2. Section 2(4) of the Extradition Act 2003 sets out the particulars required for an accusation warrant. Section 2(6) imposes different requirements for a conviction warrant. In particular, section 2(6) materially requires particulars of the conviction and sentence, but does not expressly require all the particulars of the alleged conduct, time, place and domestic law specified for an accusation warrant.
3. The court applied the distinction identified in Alexander v France [2017] EWHC 1392 (Admin): supplementary information may fill lacunae, but extradition cannot proceed on the basis of a wholly deficient document. Whether there is a lacuna or a wholesale failure depends on the facts.
4. The court treated the purposive approach in Podolak v Poland [2020] EWHC 2830 (Admin) as requiring consideration of whether admitting supplementary information would undermine mutual co-operation between the requesting and executing states.
5. The present warrant clearly stated that the sentence sought to be enforced arose from two judgments. It identified the relevant courts, dates and decision numbers, and stated how the remaining term was revoked and added to the first sentence. The warrant was therefore accurate as far as it went and enabled requests for further information. The later information filled the missing details without inconsistency.
6. The facts were materially identical to Jipa v Romania [2024] EWHC 2785 (Admin), whose reasoning the court expressly followed. They differed materially from Paduche v Romania [2025] EWHC 3128 (Admin), where the warrant wrongly attributed the whole sentence to one offence and did not mention the additional offence at all.

• High Court (Administrative Court): the appeal from the District Judge’s order for extradition was dismissed.
• Westminster Magistrates’ Court: District Judge Pilling rejected the appellant’s objections under sections 2, 20 and 21 of the Extradition Act 2003 and ordered extradition.