High Court dismisses extradition appeal in Jeremjan v District Court in Jihlava

The High Court has dismissed an appeal against extradition to the Czech Republic brought by a man whose surrender was first sought unsuccessfully from Austria before a fresh warrant secured his arrest on arrival in the United Kingdom, rejecting arguments based on abuse of process, passage of time and his right to respect for private and family life.

Mr Justice Sheldon heard the appeal brought by Alex Jeremjan against a decision of District Judge Jackson ordering his extradition to serve a two year sentence for fraud, imposed in his absence by the District Court in Jihlava following his conviction in November 2021 for failing to repay a loan guarantee. Jeremjan had been arrested in Austria in November 2022 under an earlier warrant, but was released after eighteen days when the Czech authorities failed to respond to Austrian court queries about whether his sentence could be transferred for service there and whether he would receive appeal rights. The Austrian court formally discharged that warrant in July 2023. A second warrant was issued by the Czech authorities in March 2023, certified in the UK that December, and executed when Jeremjan arrived at Manchester airport in March 2024.

On abuse of process, counsel for Jeremjan argued that issuing a fresh warrant to the United Kingdom after the Austrian request had collapsed amounted to an improper attempt to circumvent the Austrian court's proper consideration of the case, relying on the principle established in Camaras v Baia Mare Local Court Romania that a requesting authority should not be permitted to reverse the effect of its own non-compliance with court directions by issuing a further warrant. Mr Justice Sheldon rejected this argument, holding that the abuse of process jurisdiction as developed in cases such as Jasvins v General Prosecutor's Office Latvia exists to protect the integrity of court processes within this jurisdiction, and that conduct occurring in a different country's proceedings would need to reach an extreme threshold before it could have any bearing here. He found no evidence that the Czech authorities' failure to respond to the Austrian court was anything other than administrative error, particularly since the same information had in fact been provided to the UK authorities.

On passage of time, the judge accepted that the district judge's analysis contained some errors, including an understatement of the period of delay attributable to the Czech authorities, but concluded the overall finding remained sound. The period of culpable delay, properly assessed, amounted to around seventeen months rather than the drastically longer periods that have previously satisfied the oppression threshold in cases such as Kila v Governor of HMP Brixton, where twenty years of culpable delay was found decisive. The judge also found Jeremjan could not have developed a genuine sense of security given his awareness throughout that the conviction stood and his own prior experience of a discharged warrant being revived and executed in a different country.

On Article 8, the judge held the balancing exercise conducted below remained sound even accounting for the additional fourteen months Jeremjan had by then spent in custody and subsequent time on curfew following his release on bail. He rejected the submission that prison conditions in England and Wales were relevant to the proportionality assessment, noting no authority supported that proposition, and found the ten months still owing on the Czech sentence represented a substantial term generating a strong public interest in extradition. The judge also declined to give weight to a recently developed relationship in the United Kingdom, since it had begun after Jeremjan already knew he was subject to extradition proceedings, and dismissed a challenge to the Supreme Court's treatment of private life in the intervening decision of Andrysiewicz as having no real bearing on the outcome.

The appeal was dismissed on all three grounds.