The Perplexities of the Petruhhin Judgment. EIPA Briefing November 2020.

It is not often that an Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) calls on the Court to clarify its position in view of the mounting questions coming from national courts. Yet this is what Advocate General Hogan did in his Opinion of 24 September 2020 in the BY case. He was referring to the Court’s 2016 Petruhhin ruling, that an EU country which is requested by a non-EU country to extradite a national of another EU Member State must first ask that Member State if it wishes to prosecute its own national rather than fulfil the extradition request. “It is its own measure of the novelty of the solution proposed in Petruhhin that that decision does not perhaps appear to have enjoyed universal acceptance on the part of the Member States”. This Briefing explains what lies behind this comment and considers the perspectives for this controversial judgment