The Court examined the meaning of ‘offence’ under the speciality rule in the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which limits UK prosecution to offences for which a person was surrendered from Ireland.
The Court of Justice delivered judgment in Case C-528/24 (Boothnesse) today. The case arises from a criminal prosecution in the United Kingdom for fraud offences, where the defendant had been surrendered from Ireland to the UK under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement surrender procedure. He challenged the prosecution on the ground that the charges went beyond the offences for which Ireland surrendered him.
The relevant provision is Article 625 of the EU-UK TCA, which sets out the speciality rule for surrender cases under the Agreement. A person surrendered under the TCA, according to the Article, may not be prosecuted for offences other than those specified in the surrender decision. The central question was whether the term ‘offence’ in Article 625 carries an autonomous EU-law meaning or follows the definition used in UK domestic law. This distinction matters because UK prosecutors may charge individual counts at a more granular level than the offences described in an Irish surrender decision.
If ‘offence’ has a broad autonomous meaning, a prosecution for related counts can proceed within the scope of the surrender decision. If it requires a precise correspondence with the described conduct, some counts may fall outside the permitted scope.
