Leke Prendi Aka Aleks Kola v The Government of the Republic of Albania
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Holroyde,Mrs Justice Cutts |
| Judgment Date | 30 September 2021 |
| Neutral Citation | [2021] EWHC 2625 (Admin) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
| Docket Number | Case No: CO/678/2020 |
[2021] EWHC 2625 (Admin)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Holroyde
Mrs Justice Cutts DBE
Case No: CO/678/2020
David Josse QC and John Crawford (instructed by CLP Solicitors) for the Appellant
Mark Summers QC and Daniel Sternberg (instructed by CPS Extradition Unit) for the Respondent
Hearing dates 14 July 2021
Approved Judgment
Lord Justice Holroyde and
This is the judgment of the court in a rather extraordinary case.
Who is the Appellant?
The Respondent asserts that the Appellant is Leke Prendi, an Albanian national born 27 September 1980 in a hamlet near Fushë Arrëz, in the Pukë district of Albania. In December 2000, before a court in Albania, Leke Prendi was convicted in his absence of offences of manslaughter, armed robbery and illegal keeping of military weapons and ammunition (“the offences”). He was sentenced to a total term of 21 years' imprisonment, the whole of which remains to be served. On that basis, the Respondent seeks the Appellant's return. The Appellant, however, contends that he is Aleks 1 Kola, a Kosovan national born 5 October 1980 in Gjakove, Kosovo. He denies any involvement in the offences and says that he has been the victim of a mistake of identification.
An earlier attempt to extradite the Appellant to Albania failed in 2015, when a Divisional Court held that the Respondent had not proved that he was the requested person.
The Respondent subsequently made a fresh request, relying on evidence which was not before the court in 2015, and in January 2020 the Deputy Senior District Judge, Judge Ikram (“the DSDJ”), accepted that the evidence proved on the balance of probabilities that the Appellant is the requested person Leke Prendi. The Appellant now appeals against that decision.
The issues in the case relate exclusively to the correctness of the identification of the Appellant as Leke Prendi. The Appellant accepts that there is no other bar to his extradition. We can therefore summarise very briefly the circumstances of the offences and of the criminal proceedings in Albania, before looking more closely at the course of the extradition proceedings and the evidence on which the Respondent relies.
The facts:
On the night of 10 April 2000 four armed men stopped a bus travelling from Fushe-Arrez to Kukes in Albania, and robbed the passengers of their possessions. In the course of doing so, one robber fired a shot which fatally wounded another. The uninjured robbers then fled. One, Anton Kola, was later arrested. Two others escaped. The prosecution case in the criminal proceedings was that the two who escaped were Leke Prendi and Nikoll Nikolli, and that it was Leke Prendi who had fired the fatal shot.
Leke Prendi had been photographed, and his fingerprints taken, by the police in Lezhë, Albania on 12 June 1999.
The criminal proceedings in Albania:
The three accused were tried by the District Court in Pukë. Anton Kola was present in court; the other two men remained at large, but were legally represented at their trial. Leke Prendi was convicted in his absence and on 13 December 2000 was sentenced as we have previously stated. His sentence was confirmed on appeal to the Shkodra Appeal Court on 30 March 2001.
In February 2005, at the request of Albania, Interpol published a red notice showing Leke Prendi to be an internationally wanted person. It described his build (“height 168, weight 68”) and bore a photograph of him (“the Interpol photograph”). The notice was later amended by the addition of copied images of the fingerprints of Leke Prendi, which had been taken by the police in Lezhë on 12 June 1999.
The initial arrest of the Appellant:
On 20 July 2013 the Appellant was arrested in this country for common assault. He gave his name as Aleks Kola. Fingerprints taken from him that day at Northampton Police Station were found to match those held by Interpol in the name Leke Prendi.
On 17 November 2013 the Respondent issued a request for the Appellant's extradition. Pursuant to that request, the Appellant was arrested on 16 December 2013.
Albania has been designated a Part 2 territory for the purposes of the Extradition Act 2003 (“the Act”). Section 78 of the Act (“section 78”) contains provisions relating to the initial stages of an extradition hearing in a Part 2 case. So far as is material for present purposes it requires the appropriate judge to decide, amongst other things –
“(4) … whether –
(a) the person appearing or brought before him is the person whose extradition is requested; …
(5) The judge must decide the question in subsection (4)(a) on a balance of probabilities.
(6) If the judge decides any of the questions in subsection (4) in the negative he must order the person's discharge.
(7) If the judge decides those questions in the affirmative he must proceed under section 79.”
Section 79 of the Act then requires the judge to consider whether extradition is barred for one of the reasons specified in that section.
The first extradition proceedings:
The Appellant contested the extradition proceedings, contending that he was Aleks Kola and not Leke Prendi. He did not give evidence. In October 2014 a District Judge found that the Appellant was the requested person Leke Prendi and ordered that his case be sent to the Secretary of State.
The Appellant appealed to the High Court. In a judgment handed down on 24 June 2015 2, a Divisional Court 3 held that the District Judge had been wrong to admit the red notice in evidence and had in any event wrongly analysed the evidence and reached a wrong conclusion. The court concluded that the Respondent had not proved on the balance of probabilities that the Appellant was the requested person Leke Prendi, and allowed the appeal.
The second extradition proceedings:
The Respondent subsequently provided further information relating to the identity of the Appellant and made a fresh request for his extradition. On 15 February 2019 the Home Office certified the request pursuant to section 70 of the Act.
On 16 July 2019, in Essex, the Appellant was arrested by PC Maskell pursuant to the new warrant.
The Appellant again contested the proceedings on the ground that he is not the requested person Leke Prendi.
Before the DSDJ, the Respondent relied on evidence including further information provided by Albania on two occasions in 2019; the expert evidence of a fingerprint examiner Mr Macie; and the evidence of PC Maskell. PC Maskell's evidence was that having arrested the Appellant, he took him to the custody suite at Grays, Essex. There, he showed the Appellant the Interpol red notice in the name Leke Prendi, which bore a photograph, and asked whether he was the man shown. After a pause, the Appellant (who was under caution) replied “Should be”.
The appellant did not give evidence. He relied on a proof of evidence in which he said that he was Aleks Kola, born 5 October 1980 in Kosovo. He said, amongst other things, that he left Kosovo when he was about 16, went to Italy, travelled through Europe to Belgium, and came to the UK in May 2000. He said he had subsequently made a number of visits to Italy, and admitted that he had used an alias, Nikolin Pacani, when he was in Italy in about 2007. He had been arrested by the Italian authorities, and sent to Albania, where he was detained for a few hours. His photograph and fingerprints were taken by the police in Tirana. A few days later, he returned to Italy.
The Appellant in his proof of evidence denied that he had told PC Maskell that the photograph on the Interpol red notice “should be” him: he said that he had consistently denied being that person. He denied any involvement in the offences, saying that he was living in Belgium at the relevant time. He asserted that there had been a mistake regarding fingerprints, saying in his proof of evidence:
“I do not know where the fingerprints from 1999 came from, I was not in Lezhë police station in September 1999 4. Before I was in Brussels I had been living in Italy and in Serbia and so cannot have been in Lezhë police station in September 1999.”
The appellant also relied, as expert evidence, on a report written in October 2019 by Mr Raymond Evans, an image comparison analyst. Mr Evans had compared images in the name Aleks Kola with images in the name Leke Prendi. He indicated in his report that only one of the black and white photographs of Leke Prendi was suitable for a meaningful comparison: it was consistent with being the Appellant, but was not of suitable quality to allow positive identity. A very small, low resolution scanned colour image of Leke Prendi was not consistent with the Appellant. The images of Aleks Kola were of small size and poor resolution, but Mr Evans said it was nonetheless possible to perform “a general facial comparison” between the features of the subjects and he found them to be consistent with the Appellant. His overall conclusion was that the material lent no support to the contention that the Appellant, and the images in the name Aleks Kola, were Leke Prendi.
The judgment of the DSDJ:
The DSDJ noted the contents of the Appellant's proof of evidence but bore in mind that the Appellant had not given evidence and that he had therefore not been able to assess his credibility. He accepted that Mr Evans had done his best with the limited imagery provided to him, but regarded his conclusions as...
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