Court of Justice (First Chamber) 21 September 2023, C-164/22 (Ministerio Fiscal v Juan.)

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The Court of Justice (First Chamber) held that point 2 of Article 3 of Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA (mandatory non-execution of a European arrest warrant on ne bis in idem grounds) requires an autonomous, uniform assessment of whether the 'same acts' are at issue, based solely on whether the concrete circumstances are inextricably linked in time, space, and perpetrator, irrespective of how those acts are classified under the law of the executing Member State. Accordingly, the fact that offences prosecuted in two different Member States through separate legal entities and to the detriment of different victims might be classified as a single 'continuing criminal offence' (delito continuado) under Spanish law is irrelevant to that assessment. The second question, concerning the compatibility of Spanish law with the Charter and Framework Decisions 2008/675 and 2008/909 in the context of sentence aggregation, was declared inadmissible as it did not arise in the main proceedings, which concerned only the execution or refusal of the European arrest warrant.AI