For a long time, the Russian prosecutor's office sought from colleagues from Cambodia to extradite businessman Sergei Polonsky, accused of serious crimes. As a result, the Cambodian authorities detained him, considered the request from Moscow, and then released him on bail, denying his forced return. Many countries from the list of those who have not yet signed an extradition treaty with Russia do the same.
What is extradition
Extradition (from the Latin words ex - "from, outside" and traditio - "transfer") means the arrest and forced return home of citizens who have committed some crime in their homeland and fled abroad. It is also applied to suspects and persons sentenced to imprisonment, being one of the forms used by states in the fight against crime. All cases of extradition take place with the participation of not only the prosecutor's office, court, police and other law enforcement agencies, but also the National Bureau of Interpol.
Is extradition mandatory?
In words, almost all states are actively fighting crime. In fact, things are not going so smoothly, since the main condition for extradition is a formal treaty. The absence of him, as, say, in Russia and the United States, becomes a good reason for refusing to extradite the criminal to his homeland.
Experts of international law emphasize that signing a treaty is not an obligation at all, but a right. Much can influence the decision. For example, bad relations between presidents. That is why there is no complete list of countries from which there is no extradition at all. However, it is known that almost everyone, including Russia, constitutionally prohibits the extradition of only their own citizens, they are tried at home.
Many people probably remember the tragic story of the seizure of a Soviet plane and its hijacking to Turkey by the father and son Brazinskas in 1970. Then the Soviet government persistently and repeatedly demanded the extradition of the hijackers and murderers, but each time it was refused only because of the absence of an agreement.
At present, Russia has signed 65 agreements with countries that are also members of the Interpol system. At the same time, the Russians have not yet managed to come to an agreement with 123 more representatives of this international system. Among the "refuseniks", in particular, are the USA, Great Britain, Venezuela, Belarus, Ukraine, China, Sweden, Israel, Japan, Poland and others. That is, in theory, all these more than one hundred countries may well ignore the requests of the Russian authorities to extradite fugitive criminals, often doing so. However, as well as vice versa.
Contract in stock
Sometimes it happens that extradition takes place outside the contract. There is a known case when Israel nevertheless wanted to extradite Shumshum Shubaev to Russia, whom they were looking for for committing a brutal murder in Kislovodsk. But he made this gesture only after promising to return Shubaev to an Israeli prison after the trial. By the way, the Israelis extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Serbian soldier Alexander Cvetkovic, who was accused of massacres during the Civil War.
Of course, the medal also has another side; extradition is refused even with the current agreement. The grounds may be insufficient evidence base of the crime; political, not criminal, background to the request; providing a person with political asylum; abuse in prisons; the presence of torture and the death penalty.
Japan has gone even further, being able to ignore requests only on the grounds that they are being made for ethnic Japanese who fled to them. This is exactly what happened when Peru tried to extradite the former president of his country, Alberto Fujimori, from Tokyo.
Promised land
Many criminals, especially the rich, do not always hide in England, Sweden or Israel, who do not extradite them to their home countries or extradite them, but with great difficulty. Often for shelter, they choose the so-called offshore zones or economically underdeveloped and therefore especially hospitable states of Asia and Central America. The latter, in particular, include the already mentioned Cambodia, as well as Belize, Guyana, Nicaragua, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the like. Their resource-poor economy is strongly interested in the inflow of foreign capital. Even if he has a criminal trace.
