"According to international conventions, a person who has requested temporary asylum must not be handed over."
Normally, the above enshrined international assertion would be enough to stop the U.S. government from issuing veiled threats and exercising their considerable hegemonic influences over the rest of the world in their efforts to extradite NSA leaker Edward Snowden. However, as we all know, the Snowden situation is anything but normal. The U.S. has much to lose potentially if Snowden continues with the drip, drip drip leaking of embarrassing secrets. The diplomatic push back from countries all over the world is intensifying. And Snowden's Pandora's box of international communications is steadily creaking open a little more every day.
From the EU's calling for both Snowden and NSA Director Keith Alexander to testify before a commission on surveillance -- to Prime Minister Angela Merkel of Germany running the risk of losing her governing coalition in the upcoming national elections -- to the Russian government retrograding their entire federal file and memorandum procedures back to using typewriters instead of computers, the U.S. government has been forced to concentrate on extinguishing sporadic conflagrations in all corners of the world.
Our government is turning into a fire bucket brigade.
Snowden may have just threw gasoline on one of those conflagrations.
The U.S. government can hem and haw all they want about their counterparts in Russia granting temporary asylum to Edward Snowden. But the fact is any extradition agreement between the two countries is ambiguous at best and nonexistent at worst, depending, of course, from who's perspective you look at it.
At least one Russian legal scholar believes his country does indeed have a standing extradition agreement with the U.S.
From the Russian website RIA Novosti:
But as recently as 2007 a senior legal adviser to Russia’s prosecutor general publicly suggested that a controversial 19th century extradition agreement between tsarist Russia and Washington was still valid.
“The Russian Empire signed a convention on extradition with the United States in 1887. No one ever canceled it and no one ever renounced it,” Saak Karapetyan, head of international legal cooperation at Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office, told the Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets.
(snip)
The treaty cited by Karapetyan formally came into force in 1893 and sparked much outrage in the United States over a provision allowing individuals who attempt to assassinate the Tsar or members of his family to be extradited despite a ban on such transfers for political offenses.
(U.S. has extradition treaties with the countries shown in light blue)
Both the United Nations and our own State Department (and the U.N.) have said no standing extradition treaty exists.
A US State Department official told RIA Novosti that it is “the longstanding position of the United States that there is no extradition treaty in force” between the two countries, though the official provided no specific date or year. Officials at the Russian Embassy in Washington were not immediately available for comment, an embassy spokesman said.
A 1970 United Nations report on international treaties indicates Washington removed the extradition agreement from its books in 1941, though the tsarist-era agreement requires one of the sides to formally notify the other of their intention to terminate the treaty in order for it to be cancelled.
There has however been cooperation between the two countries in the past.
Despite the absence of an extradition treaty, the United States did deport accused Nazi war criminals Feodor Federenko and Karl Linnas back to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Federenko was subsequently convicted and executed by the Soviets, while Linnas died while awaiting trial.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has continued to deport individuals with criminal pasts back to Russia, with hundreds being returned over the past decade, according to statistics from the US Department of Homeland Security.
But a statement appearing in today's
South Africa's eNCA website puts the nix on any forthcoming extradition in Snowden's case.
MOSCOW - Russia's top human rights official said Thursday that it was impossible to extradite whistleblower Edward Snowden to the United States.
"According to international conventions, a person who has requested temporary asylum must not be handed over," the head of the presidential human rights council, Mikhail Fedotov, told the Interfax news agency.
Fedotov also argued that the fact that while Snowden remains in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow's hands are virtually tied.
"Whatever happens, we can do nothing to please our American partners," he said.
The US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said Thursday that the US is not asking for "extradition," but simply for "the return" of Mr Snowden.
"We have sent many people back to Russia," he wrote on Twitter.
Wherever Snowden ends up. And whatever circumstances are to follow for the intrepid intelligence leaker, an extradition will no doubt be tied up in courts in both countries for months and possibly years to come. That outcome appears to favor Snowden. The only question now is if Snowden complies with Putin's request that he ceases to release anymore classified material while in Russia.
It is temporary asylum. Snowden could simply hold off on the release of more secrets until he finds a more hospitable environment to live. Either way, the U.S. government will be forced to remain in a state of frenzied flux for some time to come.
Time, I would suggest, we can use to pressure our government to rein in these unconstitutional programs... if not end them once and for all.