AC-2023-LON-001921 - [2025] EWHC 1416 (Admin)

Fecha: 16-Oct-2025

Restriction of Liberty

28.

Qualifying Curfew is not the operation of the Article 26/624 duty which is triggered by detention (deprivation of liberty). It belongs to a different place on the legal map. The position was also explained by the CJEU in JZ. A requested person’s Art 26/624 entitlement to a deduction of Qualifying Remand for detention (deprivation of liberty) under Article 26/624 is “a minimum level of protection” (JZ at §55). But it remains open to the domestic law of an IJA to go further and allow deduction for a “restriction of liberty” which it recognises as warranting a deduction. As the Court said in JZ at §55:

Article 26(1) … cannot be interpreted … as preventing the judicial authority of the Member State that issued that arrest warrant from being able, on the basis of domestic law alone, to deduct from the total period of detention which the person concerned would have to serve in that Member State all or part of the period during which that person was subject, in the executing Member State, to measures involving not a deprivation of liberty but a restriction of it.

This, then, is the location on the legal map for the French “domestic law alone” which does indeed involve a deduction for a restriction of liberty. That is the Qualifying Curfew under the French Criminal Code. JZ §55 (described as “point 55”), which is another key theme recorded in the 28 March 2023 further information from the French Ministry of Justice, on which reliance was placed in Doga and is placed in this case.