AC-2024-LON-003550 - [2025] EWHC 2831 (Admin)

The facts are “not entirely straightforward” as Garnham J, sitting with Rafferty LJ, said at para 3. They require some elaboration to understand the court’s reasoning.

The requested person was resident in the Netherlands. In 2000 she was arrested in France for suspected drug trafficking. She was released under French “judicial supervision” and permitted to leave France, but on the understanding that she would return upon summons and notify any change of address. Once back in the Netherlands, she received the French summons and returned to France in answer to it in 2001. She was convicted on 28 June 2001 by a court of first instance in France. The judgment was handed down in her absence and she had left the court with the court’s permission (para 55). She was sentenced to 3 years’ custody. She returned to the Netherlands. She was arrested in the Netherlands in December 2001 pursuant to a French extradition request. She appealed the sentence and the appeal was due to be heard in February 2002 and then adjourned until June 2002. She was summoned but did not attend, instead having legal representation at the appeal. It was dismissed and a warrant was issued for her arrest.

The French authorities sought her extradition from the Netherlands. She was arrested in 2003 and resisted extradition. In September 2005, a European Arrest Warrant (“EAW”) was issued, but not enforced. In October 2005, the Dutch courts refused the extradition request. The Dutch Minister of Justice confirmed the decision in January 2007.

Close to a decade passed until the French authorities published an alert for the 2005 EAW in 2015. It was certified by the NCA in October 2016. In July 2018, she was arrested at Manchester Airport pursuant to the EAW when attempting to travel back to the Netherlands after a trip to the United Kingdom. A second EAW was issued in September 2018 “for reasons that are opaque” (para 21) and certified by the NCA in the same month. There were then extradition proceedings in this country.

When she left France for the Netherlands in 2001, she left with the French court’s permission. Therefore, she did not knowingly and deliberately place herself beyond the reach of the French legal process. She had been granted permission to leave court. She was informed of her conviction in Paris when she was already back in the Netherlands. When in 2002 she declined to answer the summons to attend the appeal hearing, she was, as the Divisional Court said at para 59:

“declining to surrender herself to the requesting state [which] does not constitute knowingly placing herself beyond the reach of a legal process. It amounts instead to declining to place herself within the reach of that process.”

The Divisional Court held that she was not a fugitive and the decision of the first instance judge to the contrary was wrong (para 62). Helpfully, the court set out the implications of a counterfactual (para 63):

“had the Judge found as a fact that the Appellant had fled back to Holland during the course of the French proceedings and without the Court's permission; or was told on 28 June 2001 at the French Court that she had been convicted and sentenced, so that she knew that that was the position when she returned to the Netherlands, I would have held that the Judge's conclusion on fugitive status was correct, albeit for the wrong reasons.”

The reasoning of the court on these alternative facts is clear: she would be taking a relevant action – fleeing the French jurisdiction. She would have the necessary intention: she would be fleeing to evade the French legal process.