Rather than extraditing an EU national to a non-EU country, the member state’s authorities should brief the member state of origin to ensure it has the option of issuing a European arrest warrant in order to pursue investigations, explained the European Court of Justice in a ruling issued on Tuesday 6 September.
The case in question (C-182/15) concerns the relation between two individual rights: that granted by some member states to their nationals whereby they will not be extradited to another country, and that which all European citizens have, which is to be able to travel freely within the EU with the equivalent protection that is granted to nationals of the country they happen to be in. This gave rise to the following problem: can an Estonian passport-holder be extradited from Latvia to the Russian Federation under a search opinion issued by Interpol, since Latvian law bans the extradition of Latvian passport-holders?
In such a case, the Court says that Latvia should first of all inform Estonia about the situation in order to give it the possibility to issue a European arrest warrant, as long as Estonian law foresees that its country’s nationals can be taken to court in Estonia for action committed abroad. In this way, the Court says Latvia, "the host member state, would be acting in a manner which is less prejudicial to the exercise of freedom of movement while avoiding, as far as possible, the risk of impunity". (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)