High Court overturns Article 8 discharge in Bucharest v Preda extradition appeal

The High Court has allowed an appeal by the Court of Appeal Bucharest and quashed a district judge's decision to discharge a convicted gang member on Article 8 grounds, holding that the impact of extradition on his family, though serious, fell short of the exceptional threshold required to defeat the public interest. The judgement in Court of Appeal Bucharest, Romania v Preda, handed down by Mrs Justice Arbuthnot on 7 July 2026, revisits the demanding standard reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Andrysiewicz.

Adrian Lucian Preda is sought under a Romanian warrant issued in August 2024 following convictions for a series of offences committed between 2008 and 2013, including attempted murder, public order violence, extortion and participation in an organised criminal group. He was a member of the Sportivi gang in Bucharest. Further information from the Romanian authorities established that, during a gang confrontation in July 2008, he struck a victim to the head with such force, having already been carrying a knife and a gun, that the man suffered a fractured skull and life-threatening brain injuries. The court accepted he had intended to kill. He was sentenced to five years and six months, of which around five years and three months remain to be served.

A troubled procedural history

An earlier warrant led to his arrest in January 2018, but those proceedings were discharged that April for want of an Article 3 compliant prison assurance. A communication failure, attributable more probably to the English authorities and compounded by the loss of SIRENE access after Brexit, then produced a delay of nearly six years before a fresh warrant was issued. In the meantime Preda remained in the United Kingdom with his wife and three children, built a successful business employing his wife, and committed no further offences.

District Judge Grego discharged him in November 2025, finding that extradition would have an exceptionally severe impact on the children, particularly the nine year old, BB, when read together with the delay and the family's established life here.

Reweighing the balance

Mrs Justice Arbuthnot admitted fresh evidence, applying Fenyvesi, comprising a recent assessment diagnosing BB with severe ADHD of the combined subtype and severe oppositional defiant disorder, a progression from the sub-clinical position before the district judge. Conducting the balance afresh under Celinski, she concluded that the proportionality assessment below was wrong.

The district judge had given too little weight to the gravity of the offending and the substantial sentence outstanding, offering no real analysis of the factors favouring extradition beyond a single sentence referring back to the requesting authority's submissions. He had also misremembered the psychological evidence, treating it as showing that removal now would be more damaging than in 2018, when in truth the evidence pointed both ways.

Applying Norris, Andrysiewicz and Beoku-Betts, the court accepted that the disruption to the children would be genuine and potentially long-lasting. Even taking BB's updated diagnosis at its highest, however, the consequences did not go qualitatively beyond those ordinarily encountered when a parent is imprisoned for a lengthy period. The family retained considerable strengths: a resilient mother, grandparents in Romania whom the children knew well, and the children's own Romanian language. The distinction between a case that differs in kind rather than degree had not been adequately addressed below.

Delay, though significant, could not on its own elevate the impact to the exceptional level required. The appeal was allowed, the discharge order quashed, and the case remitted to the district judge under section 29(5) of the Extradition Act 2003.