Viviane Reding says Austria had a legal basis to reject the European arrest warrant
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EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Austria had no legal obligation to deliver ex-KGB general Mikhail Golovatov to Lithuania, since the crimes he is accused of occurred eleven years before before the European arrest warrant entered into force, EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding has said.
The release of Golovatov last Friday, less than 24 hours after his arrest, sparked an intense diplomatic row between Lithuania and Austria, with Vilnius accusing Vienna of violating EU and national law and lack of solidarity with another member state.

Lithuanian prosecutors had issued the European arrest warrant in order to put Golovatov on trial for allegedly having ordered, as a former KGB general, the storming of the Lithuanian state television in 1991. The events left 14 people dead and hundreds injured as the Baltic state was declaring its independence. Golovatov is now in Russia, a country which does not extradite its citizens to the EU.

"From a legal point of view, Austria didn't have the obligation to implement the European arrest warrant," Reding told a press conference in Sopot, Poland, after an informal meeting of justice ministers where the Lithuanian-Austrian row came up.

The commissioner explained that under EU law, a country receiving an EU arrest warrant from another member state is obliged to follow it only if the crimes were committed after 2002.

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http://euobserver.com/9/32642