25 Aug Being a POW Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be Extradited
Or so says a U.S. district court sitting in Miami in rejecting former Panamian leader Manuel Noriega’s attempt to block his extradition to France. As Kevin noted back in January, Noriega has enjoyed POW status ever since he was captured by U.S. forces in Panama and he was scheduled to be released in September. But France has requested his extradition and the U.S. has granted this request.
In any event, the theory of the case seems to be that even as a POW, Noriega has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to violations of U.S. criminal laws despite being a POW. So, extradition doesn’t seem to conflict with being a POW either, according to the court.
Interestingly, the U.S. government in this case raised the possibility that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 precluded Noriega’s resort to the Geneva Conventions at all. The district court suggested that this provision would be unconstitutional but avoided reaching that issue, since it was raised in the alternative.
The bottom line: Noriega should start practicing his French.
hi – I make some further comments on this over at KAlawofwar. I’m not sure the USG remembers its own position, but I was monitoring Panama and the Noriega trial for HRW at the time. The USG at the time took the position that it was not obligated to treat Noriega as a POW, but would do so as an accommodation mostly to the views of the ICRC – it built a special facility to house him, and then after he was convicted, Judge Hoeveler stated that he believed that Noriega was entitled to actual POW status but that he, the district court judge, lacked the jurisdiction to order that substantive result. But the USG then said, well, we’ve spent a couple of million dollars creating this facility for him, we’ll leave him in it and not get into a tiff with the ICRC – but never, so far as I was aware in the early 1990s, conceded that it was obliged to treat Noriega as a POW nor that this treatment extended to anything other than conditions of confinement. Noreiga’s lawyers were happy to leave it at that, because they cared about treatment as a POW in confinement, but… Read more »