Tobosaru v Romania: Administrative Court upholds Pilecki on composite extradition sentences

The Administrative Court has dismissed two joined Romanian extradition appeals, reaffirming that a composite custodial sentence of at least four months satisfies the statutory threshold without any need to dissect its constituent parts, and taking the unusual step of recording a Crown Prosecution Service reliance on non-existent authorities generated with artificial intelligence.

In Tobosaru v Court of Law Craiova and Tofan v Suceava Local Court [2026] EWHC 1720 (Admin), Mr Justice Sweeting considered a common question: whether the district judges below were wrong to rely on the House of Lords decision in Pilecki v Poland [2008] 1 WLR 325 in finding the extradition offence test met under sections 10 and 65 of the Extradition Act 2003.

Both appellants faced conviction European Arrest Warrants for merged or cumulated sentences. Ms Tobosaru, sentenced for unlicensed firework sales, had two three-month terms merged into a four-month total, only part of which survived the dual criminality test. Mr Tofan faced a five-month cumulated sentence derived from terms of two and three months. Each argued that, because the component sentences could be identified, the court could and should apply the four-month threshold offence by offence, leaving no qualifying term once the non-extraditable conduct fell away.

The appellants pressed a more ambitious point too. They contended that Pilecki was no longer good law because its reasoning rested on the conforming interpretation principle in Pupino, which the Supreme Court had rejected in Assange [2012] UKSC 22. Stripped of that EU-law gloss, they said, sections 10 and 65 should be read literally to require a qualifying sentence for each extraditable offence.

Sweeting J rejected the argument. The relevant enquiry under section 65(3)(c) is directed to the sentence imposed in respect of the conduct, not to a hypothetical figure reconstructed for the surviving offence. Where a requesting state has imposed a single sentence of at least four months by a final judicial decision, the threshold is met, and the executing court is neither required nor entitled to attribute portions of a composite term to particular offences. To do so would invite speculation, undermine legal certainty and intrude on the sentencing process of the requesting state, with the specialty principle providing the necessary safeguard.

Crucially, the judge held that Pilecki does not depend on EU-derived interpretation at all. It reflects a long-standing domestic presumption that extradition legislation is construed to respect the judicial acts of requesting states and honour international obligations, a presumption that predates the Framework Decision and survives Assange. The approach sat comfortably with Article 599 of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and with the Supreme Court's recent decision in Andrysiewicz v Poland [2025] UKSC 23. Tega v Romania was distinguished, turning on a discrete offence that had never been aggregated. The section 10 challenges accordingly failed, as did the Article 8 grounds, neither appellant having shown circumstances exceptional enough to displace the strong public interest in extradition.

A postscript addressed the citation of two authorities that do not exist, Vlad v Romania and Jeziorski v Poland, carried through successive CPS documents. The prosecution accepted the citations likely originated in generative artificial intelligence, with the operative failing being a reviewing lawyer's failure to verify them. A review of 78 further cases handled by the same lawyer disclosed no comparable problems. Sweeting J accepted the apology and the absence of any intention to mislead, but recorded the episode as a caution on the risks of using such tools without proper oversight in legal research.