French Judicial Perspectives on the Extradition of Transnational Terrorists and the Political Offense Exception (From International Aspects of Criminal Law - Enforcing United States Law in the World Community, P 66-89, 1981, Richard B Lillich, ed.)

• NCJ Number: 85836
• Author(s): T E Carbonneau
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 24 pages
• Sale Source: Michie Co
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This analysis reviews how various national courts have handled the concept of a political offense in the extradition context and then discusses the trend in French court decisions to impose legal sanctions on transnational terrorists.

Abstract

The practice of exempting political offenders from the extradition process became firmly established during the 19th century. Predominance tests devised by the American, British, and Swiss courts allowed them to consider the circumstances in which an incident occurred, the offender's personal motive, and relationship between the alleged purpose and the means employed to achieve that purpose. Although this methodology liberally interpreted political offense in cases involving extradition of individuals fleeing from totalitarian regimes, it was not used in other settings to characterize terrorist acts as political crimes. Early decisions of the French courts espoused an objective test which limited political offenses to those crimes which directly injure the rights of the State. Uneasy about this doctrine's restrictiveness, the French have moved toward the more flexible predominance approach. This trend is evident in the Rodriguez (1953), Hennin (1967), Inacio da Palma (1967), and Astudillo-Calleja (1978) cases. Unlike English and Swiss case law, French jurisprudence has no clear precedent establishing that terrorist acts are without the purview of the political offense exception. The Cour d'appel of Paris has decided several cases involving the extradition of transnational terrorists during the past 5 years, but doctrine has been unstable with only the more recent rulings supporting efforts to suppress international criminality. While the Holder and Abu Daoud cases went against extradition of terrorists, decisions in the Croissant, Piperno, and Pace cases demonstrate that French jurisprudence has undergone a marked doctrinal reformulation. The court is not only aligning itself with the trend among courts of other nations in removing terrorist crimes from the political offense exemption, but is remolding its decisions in the spirit of the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism. The article contains 78 footnotes.