Luxembourg: The Court of Justice ruled on 3 November 2026 that a disproportionate sentence does not, by itself, let a national court refuse a European arrest warrant. The judgment, reported as Case C-583/24, answers a question from the Amsterdam District Court about a Romanian man sentenced to seven years in prison over a handful of drugs. It keeps the bar for refusing a European arrest warrant high, even when the sentence looks harsh by the standards of the executing state.

The facts explain why the Dutch judges hesitated. A Romanian court sentenced the man, identified in reports only as DZ, in December 2023 for importing three grams of cannabis and four MDMA pills, and Romania issued the warrant in January 2024. The Dutch court found that the drugs served his wife’s personal use and that he had no intention to sell them. According to Brussels Signal, a comparable offence in the Netherlands would bring between one and three weeks in prison.

The Court answered that mutual trust between member states sits at the centre of the system, so executing authorities must surrender a person unless a listed ground applies or a real fundamental rights risk exists. Agence Europe quotes the judgment as saying that a disproportionate sentence is not among the grounds for non-execution that the EU legislature expressly provided. The European arrest warrant therefore works as a tool of recognition, not as an invitation to second-guess the sentence.

Refusal remains possible, but only through a two-step test. The executing court first asks whether systemic or generalised deficiencies affect the issuing state, and it then asks whether the individual faces a real risk of a fundamental rights breach. Large differences between national sentencing laws do not prove such deficiencies. The Court held that Romania’s seven-year minimum for high-risk drugs cannot be regarded as an inhuman or degrading punishment, according to Agence Europe.

The judges also warned about the alternative. If the executing state could refuse a European arrest warrant because its own law is lighter, it would effectively gain a general power to review criminal judgments delivered in other member states, in the words Agence Europe reports. Brussels Signal adds that a narrow exception stays open where the law or practice of the issuing state shows a manifest and serious proportionality breach with no effective remedy. Rules that stop judges from weighing the seriousness of the offence and the personal circumstances would be an example. The Court found no such failing in Romanian law.

Readers should note the limits of the reporting on this European arrest warrant ruling. The Court’s own press release and judgment text did not open during research, so the quotes come from secondary coverage and may paraphrase the judgment. Brussels Signal also reports that Romania has since raised its minimum penalty to ten years, a point that rests on a single source.

The Amsterdam District Court now takes the final surrender decision and must apply this interpretation. Defence lawyers in other cases will find less room to argue that a long sentence alone blocks surrender, while prosecutors in issuing states will read the ruling as confirmation that the system survives disagreements over sentencing policy. The practical test comes when national courts apply the narrow exception, because they must now point to concrete failings in the issuing state’s law instead of a harsh result in one case. Until then, the European arrest warrant remains one of the strongest tools of EU judicial cooperation.