Case C-667/26, Miaccu II – a warrant for someone who cannot stand trial
The grounds for refusing a European arrest warrant are listed in the Framework Decision, and the Court has always said the list is exhaustive. Italy has added one through its code of criminal procedure. The Corte d’appello di Milano asks whether that is allowed.
Facts
GL is the subject of a European arrest warrant being executed before the Corte d’appello di Milano. Italian Law No 69/2005, which implements Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA, provides in Article 39(1) that the general provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure apply “in so far as they are compatible”. Through that reference, a rule of the Code becomes a ground for refusal: the warrant cannot be executed if the requested person is unable to take part in the proceedings with full awareness because of their mental state, where that state is irreversible. No such ground appears among the mandatory or optional grounds for non-execution in Articles 3, 4 and 4a of the Framework Decision. The referring court asks whether recital 12 and Article 1(3) — the provisions on respect for fundamental rights — nonetheless permit it. (Miaccu II is a fictitious name assigned under the Court’s anonymisation practice; it does not correspond to any party.)
Questions Referred
Must recital 12 and Article 1(3) of Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA be interpreted as not precluding national legislation implementing that framework decision, such as Italian Law No 69/2005, which, by referring in Article 39(1) to the general provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, ‘in so far as they are compatible’, provides that the European arrest warrant cannot be executed if the person requested by the issuing State is unable to participate in the proceedings with full awareness because of their mental state, that state being irreversible?
Sources
OJ notice C/2026/4398 (EUR‑Lex) · Case file on CURIA · Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA
Comment
The Court’s answer to a closely related question already exists, and it points away from a new ground for refusal and towards a procedure. In Case C‑699/21, E.D.L. (ECLI:EU:C:2023:295) the requested person was seriously ill. The Court held that Articles 1(3) and 23(4), read with Article 4 of the Charter, require the executing authority, where surrender would expose the person to “a real risk of a significant reduction in his or her life expectancy or of a rapid, significant and irreversible deterioration in his or her state of health”, to postpone surrender and ask the issuing authority how it intends to adapt the conditions of prosecution or detention — and only “if … that risk cannot be ruled out within a reasonable period of time” to refuse. Refusal, in other words, is the end of a dialogue, not a ground written into national law in advance.
The Italian rule works differently in two respects. It is categorical: an irreversible incapacity bars execution without any exchange with the issuing State. And its concern is not the risk to the person’s health from surrender but the fairness of the proceedings that would follow — whether a person who cannot understand them can be tried at all. That second point is the stronger one for Italy, because fitness to take part in one’s own trial is a guarantee of criminal procedure generally, not an Italian peculiarity. The difficulty is that it is the issuing State’s procedure, not the executing State’s, that will apply after surrender, and mutual trust presumes that the issuing State will respect the defendant’s fitness to stand trial as its own law and Article 47 of the Charter require.
The likely answer, then, is that the Framework Decision precludes a free-standing national ground of refusal of this kind, but that the situation it targets is caught by the E.D.L. mechanism and by the issuing State’s own obligations — so that the executing court must ask, and may refuse only if the answer shows the person would be put through proceedings they cannot follow. That is a narrower protection than the Italian legislature intended, and a more cooperative one. With Blerens and Casres, this is the third arrest-warrant reference reported here this year, each testing a different point at which the executing court may look behind the warrant.