A judge who blocks an extradition on humanitarian grounds has long been seen as the end of the story. The Court of Justice of the European Union has now decided it is only the beginning. In a ruling handed down on 4 June, the Luxembourg court told member states that refusing to surrender a convicted person because of degrading prison conditions abroad does not hand that person a clean slate. The state that says no to the warrant must, where it can, serve the sentence itself.
The case reached the Court from Belgium, whose courts had declined to execute European arrest warrants issued by Romanian and Greek authorities. Two individuals were wanted to serve custodial sentences already imposed in those countries. Belgian judges concluded that handing them over would expose them to a real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment, given documented overcrowding and conditions in the issuing states. That conclusion, the European judges accepted, was legitimate. What followed from it was the point of dispute.
The European arrest warrant was built on a simple promise: that courts across the Union trust one another enough to surrender suspects and convicts almost automatically. Mutual trust is the engine of the whole system. But trust has frayed where detention conditions in some member states fall below the standards the Charter of Fundamental Rights demands, and national courts have increasingly used that gap to refuse cooperation. The risk, left unaddressed, was a growing category of people convicted in one country yet untouchable because another country would not send them back.
The Court’s answer tries to close that escape hatch without forcing anyone into a degrading cell. A refusing state, it held, must take all possible steps to ensure the sentence is actually enforced on its own territory. Recognition of the foreign judgment and domestic execution of the penalty become the expected route. Refusal, in other words, shifts responsibility rather than dissolving it. The convicted person serves the time, just under conditions that respect fundamental rights.
For national justice ministries the practical consequences are considerable. Taking over a foreign sentence is not a formality. It requires legal machinery to recognise the original conviction, translate it into a domestic penalty, and manage the prisoner through to release. Smaller systems may find themselves absorbing cases they never prosecuted, with the attendant costs falling on their own budgets. Defence lawyers, meanwhile, will scrutinise whether every possible step was genuinely taken, opening a fresh seam of litigation over what the duty actually requires.
The deeper significance lies in the signal sent to the states whose prisons triggered the refusals in the first place. The ruling does not punish Romania or Greece, but it makes their detention conditions a problem that travels. Every refusal grounded in prison standards is now also an indictment that other capitals must act upon, and an incentive for the issuing state to bring its facilities up to the line the Charter draws. Mutual trust, the Court is effectively saying, is a two-way obligation.
Whether the judgment strengthens the warrant system or simply redistributes its strains will depend on how willingly governments shoulder the new burden. What is clear is that the Court has refused to accept impunity as the price of human rights. A person convicted of a crime cannot escape the sentence merely because the cell that awaits them is unfit. The penalty must be served, somewhere that the Union can defend.
