McNabb in the News (8-24-06)

Senior Principal Douglas McNabb was interviewed by dealbreaker.com’s John Carney for a story on Jacob Alexander, the former CEO of Comverse.

Obviously, the best place to hide out is a country without an extradition treaty with the US. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of these, and often they are not the most comfortable place to live. The next best plan is to find a country with a limited treaty, under which a fugitive can only be extradited for the most serious crimes.

But even if you cannot get to one of these countries, there’s still a difference between countries with recent extradition treaties and ones with older treaties, McNabb explains. The recent treaties define extraditable offenses very broadly—basically, the alleged action just needs to be a felony in both countries. These make extradition a relatively straight forward affair. The older treaties contain a laundry list of extraditable crimes—meaning the US must show that the alleged crime fits one of the crimes listed in the treaty. For laws of more recent provenance, this can make extradition more difficult.

“I’m not saying it’s a slam dunk you are going to lose with the modern clauses, but they certainly make it harder to contest extradition,” McNabb says.^[1]

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[1] John Carney, Sri Lanka: Probably Not Such A Good Place to Be A Fugitive<.i>, dealbreaker.com, Aug. 24, 2006.