[2016] EWHC 386 (Admin)
The court considered issues concerning the availability of the bar to extradition in the Extradition Act 2003 s.14 based on the passage of time in cases where the requested person had left the requesting state while subject to a suspended sentence which was subsequently activated.
In three conjoined appeals against extradition orders, the court considered issues concerning the availability of the bar to extradition in the Extradition Act 2003 s.14 based on the passage of time.
All three appellants had been subject to suspended sentences imposed in their native country, Poland. They all left Poland for the UK before their sentences were activated for breaches of the terms of their sentences. The effect of s.14(b) was that in a conviction case the only passage of time on which reliance could be placed as barring extradition under s.14 was that since the person became “unlawfully at large”.
The issues were (1) the point at which a person subject to a suspended sentence became unlawfully at large; (2) the point at which such a person was to be treated as a fugitive, a status which, pursuant to case law, precluded reliance on the passage of time under s.14; (3) whether the district judges who had made the extradition orders in the instant cases had been correct to find that the three appellants were not entitled to rely on the passage of time under s.14(b).
HELD: (1) A person would not be “unlawfully at large” within s.14(b) until he was subject to an immediate sentence of imprisonment. Accordingly, a person subject to a suspended sentence would not become unlawfully at large until his sentence was activated. Further, such a person would not need to know that his sentence had been activated. Whether a person was unlawfully at large within s.14(b) depended on whether he was at large in contravention of a lawful sentence under the applicable legal system. That was an objective state of affairs to which his knowledge and understanding were irrelevant, Salbut v Poland [2014] EWHC 4275 (Admin) followed and Pinto v Portugal [2014] EWHC 1243 (Admin) not followed (see paras 52-54 of judgment).
(2) A person subject to a suspended sentence who voluntarily left the jurisdiction in question, thereby knowingly preventing himself from performing the obligations of that sentence, and in the knowledge that the sentence might as a result be implemented, could not rely on the passage of time resulting from his absence from the jurisdiction as a statutory bar to extradition if the sentence was, as a result, subsequently activated. The activation of the sentence was the risk to which the person had knowingly exposed himself. Such a situation fell firmly within the fugitive principle enunciated in Kakis v Cyprus [1978] 1 W.L.R. 779 and Gomes v Trinidad and Tobago [2009] UKHL 21, [2009] 1 W.L.R. 1038. The fact that the person’s motive for leaving the jurisdiction was economic and not a desire to avoid the sentence did not make the principle inapplicable, Kakis and Gomes applied (para.59).
(3) The district judges had been entitled to find that the three appellants became fugitives when they left Poland (before their sentences were activated) and that they were therefore not entitled to rely on the passage of time under s.14(b) (paras 64, 67, 69).
(4) Two of the appellants had challenged the decisions reached by the district judges in their cases on the issue of ECHR art.8. In both cases, the district judge had been entitled to find that extradition would be proportionate (paras 77, 80).
Appeals dismissed
Law Lessons 4 Life 