The Apology Required a Further Apology

Two people were resisting extradition from England to Romania. They appealed against the orders. The Crown Prosecution Service acts for the country requesting an extradition, so it argued against them.

On 3 June 2025 the CPS prepared its grounds of opposition. That is the document setting out why an appeal should fail.

The document argued for the continuing application of the reasoning in an earlier case, Pilecki. It offered two decisions in support. Both were said to come from the Administrative Court, which is the part of the High Court that hears these appeals.

The two were Vlad v Romania [2017] EWHC 2060 (Admin) and Jeziorski v Poland [2019] EWHC 3885 (Admin).

The citations are of the correct form. The years are plausible. A neutral citation is the court’s own reference for a judgment, and these were of the right magnitude. The countries named are the ones a reader would expect.

Mr Justice Sweeting handed down judgment on 8 July 2026 in Andreea-Maria Tobosaru v Court of Law Craiova, Romania [2026] EWHC 1720 (Admin). He dispensed with the matter in five words. “Neither of these authorities exists.”

They were not caught at the permission stage. That is the point at which a court decides whether an appeal may go ahead at all. They were carried forward, unaltered, into the CPS’s own later submissions. By the time anybody looked at them properly they had been put before the High Court twice. The body that put them there was the national prosecuting authority of England and Wales.

Its account of the operative cause is precise. The cause was human error in the failure to verify the authorities relied upon. The reviewing lawyer did not properly check the accuracy of the document.

This is, so far as the Bureau can establish, entirely true. It is also a description of a machine writing two case names and a person not reading them. Only the second half of that sentence has an agent in it.

What raises the file above the ordinary run is what happened next. The CPS wrote to apologise. In doing so it told the court that the error had not been identified by the respondents. It had been drawn to their attention, the letter said, by counsel for the appellants.

That was not so. A junior barrister on the CPS’s own side had also been unable to find the two authorities. He had raised it with the CPS independently, shortly before the lawyers for the two people facing extradition did.

The service accordingly made a further apology for this error. That is an apology for the account it had given while apologising. The correction ran in the more flattering direction and had to be corrected back.

An internal review followed. The CPS examined nearly eighty other cases conducted by the same lawyer. It found no similar issue in any of them. It assessed that lawyer’s work as being of a good standard. It concluded that the risk of recurrence was low and reinforced its verification processes.

Both appeals were dismissed on their merits. The fictitious authorities played no part in the reasoning. Sweeting J accepted the apology and found no attempt to mislead.

The Bureau records all of this in full. An incident with no casualty is still an incident. Seventy-eight or so files were opened, read and closed by human beings in order to establish that a machine had done this once.

The judge’s own observation is filed as the finding of record. It would be naive, he said, to assume that there will not be an increasing use of artificial intelligence in legal work in future. Such use may be both necessary and beneficial. The episode highlights the risks of its use without appropriate oversight, particularly for legal research.

The two decisions did not exist on 3 June 2025 and do not exist today.

In the interval they were cited to the High Court of England and Wales. They were relied upon by the prosecution. They were transcribed into a second document. They were apologised for once, mis-described in the apology, and apologised for again. At no stage did anybody open them. There was nothing to open.