Criminal Prosecutions of U.S. Citizens Abroad: A Brief Overview
In rare circumstances, United States citizens are the victims, or even the perpetrators, of crimes in foreign nations. It is a basic premise—one that some Americans overlook—that while in a foreign county an American citizen is subject to that country’s laws, which in some cases can carry far harsher penalties that similar violations in the U.S. When charged with a crime in a foreign country, a U.S. citizen must go through that country’s criminal justice system and—as memorably attested to by films such as Midnight Express, Return to Paradise, Brokedown Palace and the National Geographic Channel’s series Locked Up Abroad—stay in that country’s prisons, sometimes under far worse conditions than American prisons.
The United States Department of State protects the rights of American citizens abroad, provides a wide array of service to citizens who are detained abroad, works to ensure that citizens are afforded due process under local laws and are treated consistent with internationally recognized standards of human rights, and monitors conditions in foreign prisons. When a U.S. citizen is convicted of a crime in a foreign country, he or she, in some cases, may apply to be transferred to the United States to serve out the remainder of his or her foreign sentence if the foreign country has a “prisoner transfer treaty” with the U.S. See 18 U.S.C. § 4100 et seq. (In contrast, prosecutors who wish to prosecute individuals located in a foreign country utilize “mutual legal assistance treaties,” which the U.S. currently possesses with over 50 other nations, including the European Union as a whole). The U.S. is a party to two multilateral prisoner transfer treaties, the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons, or COE Convention, and the Inter-American Convention on Serving Criminal Sentences Abroad, or OAS Convention, and, in addition, has bilateral prisoner transfer treaties in effect with approximately thirteen countries.
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