Maltese man fights court's decision to allow extradition to Lithuania

The Court of Appeal will next week begin hearing an appeal tabled by a Maltese man fighting extradition to Lithuania, who is claiming that a magistrate had “turned a Nelson's eye” to the brutal prison regime in that country in approving the extradition request.

The appeal was filed on Thursday by lawyers Jason Azzopardi, Kris Busietta and Patrick Valentino who are the legal team defending Angelo Spiteri.

The application decribes the decision by Magistrate Aaron Bugeja to allow the extradition, in view of the “disgusting and stomach-turning human rights breaches for which Lithuanian prisons are so notorious” as a failure by the court to “uphold the duties imposed on it neither as a Court of Law implementing a quintessentially European Union legislation which has respect for fundamental human rights as its leitmotif, nor as a Court of a Member State bound (in the international law sense) to refuse extradition to a country which is the scourge of Europe as far the inhuman and degrading treatment meted out in its notorious prisons goes.”

Spiteri is the director of a Lithuanian-registered travel company Atostogu Sandelis, who is wanted to face fraud charges in Lithuania. He is the subject of a European Arrest Warrant in Lithuania, where along with two others, is accused of setting up “Atostogu sandèlis” (loosely translated as "Holiday Warehouse") in Vilnius – a false company which would convince its victims to sign accommodation agreements with certain hotels and after signing and receiving payment for this, would deliberately not provide the service which he had received payment for.

After several lively hearings, the court had turned down a request by Spiteri's lawyers that the court seek a ruling from the European Court of Justice on whether or not European legislation regulating the European Arrest Warrant had been incorrectly transposed into local law by the Maltese legislator.

The resulting appeal lambasts the decision to approve a European Arrest Warrant for Spiteri as a “dereliction of Treaty of the European Union-imposed obligations.”

Last July the ECHR delivered its judgment on a case which had been filed by Markus Kardišauskas against the Lituanian government. Kardišauskas was left with a 10% disability following a beating he recieved at the hands of his fellow inmates at one Lithuanian prison in 2003. Although in this case the court had held that Kardišauskas' request for damages was time-barred, the case hilights the risks faced by prison inmates in that country.

The application highlighted previous judgments by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) as well as reports by human rights bodies which report Lithuania as having been found guilty as recently as December 2015 of having breached Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights on account of the degrading and inhuman conditions in its prisons.

The defence had suggested that the Maltese authorities could allow Spiteri's extradition for trial on condition that he be returned to serve his sentence in Malta and avoid the ghoulish Lithuanian prison system, but this suggestion had not been taken up by the court.