Some countries (France at least I think) have a constitutional bar on extradition of citizens from their own territory and instead allow citizens to be prosecuted domestically for crimes committed abroad (but according to the standards of domestic law). This is a logical alternative I think although it typically doesn't extend to a bar on the extradition of foreigners to either their home country or third countries so that system wouldn't have helped him here.
This is not the case with the European Arrest Warrant anymore. France only retained the right for the accused to spend the eventual sentence in France.
Do you know what happens if a penalty doesn't exist in France? E.g. Sweden cannot sentence people to a 40 years prison sentence. Could a German court sentence me to something like that and send me home to Sweden for 40 years?
The European arrest warrant, as other extradition agreements have a clause that they only work in cases where the offence is a criminal act in both countries. A famous recent case is Carles Puigdemont who was arrested in Germany by request on the Spanish government for "rebellion" but a German court decided that what he did (fight for Catalan independence) isn't a criminal offence in Germany and that he only could be indighted for misuse of public funds.
"""On 12 July 2018 the higher court in Schleswig-Holstein [Germany] confirmed that Puigdemont could not be extradited by the crime of rebellion, but may still be extradited based on charges of misuse of public funds. Puigdemont's legal team said they would appeal any decision to extradite him. Ultimately, though, Spain dropped its European arrest warrant, ending the extradition attempt. Puigdemont was once again free to travel, and chose to return to Belgium."""
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carles_Puigdemont
Double-criminality is not an absolute requirement for the execution of an EAW. The most common categories of crime are explicitly excluded from such a requirement - precisely because the whole point of the EAW is to speed up extradition of the most common cases. It just happened that Spain attempted to prosecute Puigdemont for a crime that did not fall in any of those categories. That decision was mostly a sign that the Spanish government that initiated the process was not very competent on this subject.
I’ve not read the whole treaty, but according to Wikipedia only the Dutch enjoy a system where the sentence has to match what an equivalent Dutch sentence should be. So I would assume that yes, Germany could convict you and send you to Swedish jail for 40+ years. But to be fair there are a number of grey areas, depending on the details of each case. It’s difficult to harmonize 27 criminal systems...
