According to the summary provided by the EUAA Courts and Tribunals Network:

The applicant applied for international protection in the Czech Republic after he unsuccessfully sought asylum in other European Union Member States, stating he is Muslim of Chechen nationality and was active in the Chechen wars. The applicant sought asylum due to the fear of political persecution.

Before applying, he had been convicted of robbery in the Czech Republic. Russian authorities also suspected him of a murder committed in the Russian Federation and, therefore, asked for extradition of the applicant for the purpose of criminal prosecution. Czech criminal courts did not consider the charge fabricated because of political reason or due to the applicant’s participation in the Chechen wars and allowed the extradition. Consequently, the Ministry found the application for international protection inadmissible due to the fact that there were serious reasons for considering that he had committed serious non-political crime, and thus exclusion clauses were applicable to him.

The applicant then filed an action to the Municipal Court in Prague to overturn the decision. The court quashed the decision and remanded the case to the Ministry for further procedure. The Ministry filed a cassation complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court (hereinafter “SAC”).

First, the SAC confirmed that the Ministry could not rely solely on the criminal courts’ decision concerning the admissibility of extradition to Russia when deciding on the possibility to grant international protection. It was obliged to make its own independent and sufficiently reasoned assessment whether the conditions for the application of the exclusion clause within the meaning of asylum law were fulfilled, not to rely “blindly” on the assessment made by the criminal courts. If the outcome of the extradition proceeding was determinative for the outcome of asylum proceeding, the constitutional requirement to halt the extradition until the final asylum decision is reached would lose its sense. In order to assess the serious reasons for considering that the applicant committed a serious non-political crime, due regard must be given to the applicant’s asylum story and its credibility, which could point to the superficial and persecutory nature of the criminal charges against the applicant.

The SAC also ruled that once the exclusion clause of Article 12 Qualification Directive becomes applicable, there is no further room to consider the prospects of persecution or risk of refoulement within the asylum proceedings. The SAC referred to the CJEU judgment in joint cases of C-57/09 and C‑101/09, in which CJEU considered the exclusion from a refugee status under Art. 12 (2)(b) or (c) of the Council Directive 2004/83/EC (“former qualification directive”, these provisions have the same content as those contained in the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council 2013/32/EU – “qualification directive”) and concluded that it was not necessary to test the proportionality of application of the exclusion clause in each particular case. Yet, CJEU also stressed that did not rule out the applicability of the non-refoulement principle in the context of extradition proceedings. According to the SAC, however, protection from refoulement has to be awarded in another type of proceeding, not international protection.

The SAC found that the Municipal Court wrongly ruled on the Ministry of the Interior´s obligation to acquire the whole extradition file and the (non)examination of the non‑refoulement principle. Henceforth, the SAC annulled both the decision by the Municipal Court in Prague as well as the decision of the Ministry of the Interior due to their unlawfulness.