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by gst 3677 days ago
I don't know about the law of other countries, but my home country (Austria) does not extradite its own citizens, no matter what the crime is. However, it is possible that you end up in front of an Austrian court, even if you commited the crime in another country. This will only happen in cases where the crime is actually a crime in Austria. Furthermore, the court will use Austrian law, so US law would be quite irrelevant in that case.

There might be an exception when the extradition request is issued by an EU country, but I'm not sure how this would be handled. Afaik the EU requires member states to extradite citizens and non-citizens to other member states. However, (afaik) the law that prevents Austria from extraditing its own nationals is at the constitution level.

1 comments

Austrian citizens are subject to arrest and direct surrender to other EU states under execution of a European Arrest Warrant without extradition, since 2002. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A3...

Austria did reserve the limited possibility of refusing enforcement of EAWs on its citizen for acts not punishable under Austrian law, but that's it; which is not much different from the optional non-execution provision available to all EU states.

It also has bilateral extradition treaties with other non-EU states including the USA, again, with some reservations for its own citizens. But to say Austria doesn't extradite its citizens is wrong. For most crimes, any other EU state can issue a warrant and have Austrian citizens arrested and summarily removed without any full-blown extradition proceeding.

That's why I mentioned that I'm not sure about extradition to other EU countries. Extradition of its own citizens to other non-EU countries is currently not possible.

The law for this is "§ 12 ARHG Verbot der Auslieferung österreichischer Staatsbürger" which is part of the Austrian constitution: http://www.jusline.at/12_Verbot_der_Auslieferung_%C3%B6sterr...

https://books.google.com/books?id=0H5XqvUu3B4C provides an English explanation of that law:

1173. Extradition of Austrian nationals is not admissible pursuant to Article 12, paragraph 1 of the ARHG. The authorities mentioned that this provision has the rank of a constitutional provision and, as such, requires a 2/3 majority of Parliament to be amended. Nevertheless, as of January 1, 2009, Austria will be in a position to extradite its own nationals to other EU-Member States in accordance with Section 5 EU-JZG.

1174. Where extradition for ML is denied on the sole ground of nationality, the Austrian courts are competent under Article 65, paragraph 1, no. 1 of the StGB (jurisdiction over acts committed by Austrians abroad) and must conduct the proceedings in the same way as for any other criminal offense under national law. The Austrian courts also have explicit jurisdiction over terrorist acts and terrorist financing when the perpetrator is Austrian (Article 64, paragraph 1, nos. 9 and 10 of the StGB).