Extradition - Could It Happen to You?

Just in case you didn't hear, recently Austria refused to extradite Kazakhstan's former ambassador back to Kazakhstan to face trial for an alleged kidnapping.The ambassador, Rakhat Aliyev told Austrian authorities that he thinks his life would be in danger if he returned to Kazakhstan. He also said the case against him is politically motivated because he has considered running for president. Therefore, the Austrian court ruled that it could not guarantee Rakhat Aliyev a fair trial if he returned home.
As Ambassador Aliyev now knows all too well, extradition is when authorities surrender and transfer alleged fugitives or criminals from one state, nation or authority to another. Under the Fourth Amendment, one U.S. state is obliged to extradite a wanted fugitive to another state.
But what if you move "offshore" and make your home in another country? How likely is it you'd be extradited to face tax or criminal charges in another country?
Until now, the answer has been "highly unlikely" - unless you were wanted for a violent crime. But if Big Brother governments have their way, the list of extraditable offenses will expand to include "tax" and "fiscal" offenses. That's on top of politically motivated extraditions.
The Strict Safeguards that Supposedly Protect Freedom SeekersBut protection for tax exiles and freedom seekers still can be found in a well-established body of international law - if politics doesn't get in the way.Governments jealously guard the right to govern extraditing criminal suspects from their own country. Most countries have treaties with strict safeguards that govern official extradition. However, most extraditions are done informally. For instance, in America and other nations an illegal immigrant is not usually entitled to a hearing before being sent home.
Immigration officials may arrest a "fugitive" working without a legal permit. Then they can hand the accused over to police across the border or put him on a plane home. There has been a lot of that sort of "informal" extradition in the U.S. news lately.
In other "informal" extraditions, fugitives have been abducted from a foreign country and taken to another nation for trial and/or punishment.
A famous example occurred in 1960, when Israeli agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina. He was returned to Israel to stand trial for Nazi war atrocities committed during World War II, convicted and later executed.
Extradition by Kidnapping is LegalDon't be too shocked, but the United States has used kidnapping as a judicially approved extradition method. In 1990, agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) kidnapped Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Machain from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico to stand trial in Los Angeles for the alleged murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar.
U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie denounced the government's weak case and found the kidnapping violated the U.S.-Mexico Extradition Treaty. The judge concluded that Dr. Alvarez-Machain was abducted at gunpoint in Mexico by "paid agents" of the United States, tortured by his abductors and injected with mind-altering drugs.The Mexican attorney general demanded the extradition of two DEA agents on charges of kidnapping, but the United States ignored the demand. The abduction was widely criticized internationally. In 1990, Judge Rafeedie dismissed the case against Dr. Alvarez. The government appealed, and in 1992, the Supreme Court reversed this decision. But by then, the doctor was home in Mexico.The Court ruled, in effect, that barring language specifically banning kidnapping in the relevant U.S. extradition treaty, it is legal to kidnap criminal suspects for extradition to the United States.
"Formal" ExtraditionFormal extradition, by comparison, is a complex process governed by the terms of bilateral treaties between the nations involved.Unless the host nation is willing to relinquish a fugitive, it can be impossible to retrieve this person - unless the requesting government resorts to kidnapping or other the coercive methods I have described.Formal extradition begins when a diplomatic agent asks the host nation to surrender the fugitive. Even if there is an extradition treaty between the two nations, the sanctuary nation will not always surrender the individual. The decision will depend on its interpretation of the treaties, as judged by its own courts, as in the recent case in Austria.
The legal principle of "specialty" requires that when extradition is granted, the requesting State may put the fugitive on trial only for those specific offenses on which the request was based. Of course, once fugitives are returned to the country that wants them, there is little a foreign government can do. All they can do is protest, if the extradited person is tried for additional crimes, or suffers punishment not permitted in the host country, especially capital punishment.
Another important principal is "dual criminality," which allows extradition only when the fugitive's alleged acts are recognized as statutory crimes in both countries. Violations of this principle are a common basis for refusal of formal extradition requests.
Any "Safe Havens" Left?To avoid extradition, a fugitive can flee to a jurisdiction with no extradition treaties with the country that is in pursuit. Civil law countries may be protective, since many of them ban extradition of their own citizens.But don't count on the United States to be a safe haven. The U.S. government has the authority to arrest and detain a foreign citizen for extradition without an independent showing of "probable cause" in a U.S. court that the accused committed a crime abroad.All that's required is a statement from the requesting country merely alleging probable cause exists. On this basis, the U.S. government can hold a foreigner in jail for extradition.
What About You?At the present time, it is relatively easy to avoid extradition unless you've committed a serious crime listed as grounds for extradition in the relevant extradition treaty, if one even exists. This list of extraditable crimes, however, is growing rapidly.The United States is at the forefront of this expansion movement. When it lacks solid grounds for its extradition demands, the U.S. government often uses as justification catch-all criminal "tax fraud" or "mail/wire fraud" provisions of its extradition treaties. More recently, "racketeering" and "money laundering" are the crimes alleged.A leading international tax consultant in Washington, D.C. told me (off the record, since he must deal with the IRS constantly) that most nations are reluctant to extradite anyone from their countries for alleged tax offenses.Foreign tax laws usually apply criminal penalties only to intentional tax fraud, such as false filings. Many countries treat failure to file as negligence rather than evasion or fraud, since their systems require filing of an estimated income statement. On that statement, the government bases tax bills that are sent later.
If you find yourself in such a situation, you may have little recourse but to relocate to a country without an extradition treaty with your home country, or one that excludes the particular crime or crimes of which you're accused.