|
Tuesday, 24.07.2007
Litvinenko, the Russian Constitution and double standards
by Prof.Wolfgang Seiffert, Hamburg. Putin repeatedly claims that the West applies double standards when dealing with Russia, and it is truly the case that legal norms are applied very differently. Take, for instance, the Litvinenko scandal.
|
|
London is accusing Moscow of refusing to extradite to Britain the murder suspect Lugovoi, and has reacted to this failure to extradite by expelling four Russian diplomats. Numerous media outlets in Britain and other countries have called Russia’s angry reaction to this unjustified, and that Russia is issuing threatens. (Brown).
|
But it is a general fact that the constitutions of most states prohibit extradition of their citizens to other states.
|
The German constitution also prohibits extradition
|
Articles 16 of the German Basic Law reads: " No German can be extradited to another country.”. Similarly, Article 61 of the Russian Constitution reads: „A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be expelled from the Russian Federation or extradited to another state.” Great Britain also does not extradite its citizens abroad.
|
The British authorities are demanding nothing less than that the Russians breach their own constitution.
|
The case of the 13 CIA agents for which the Munich district court has issued an arrest order has been treated very differently. In this case, the German Ministry of Justice confirmed that the extradition agreement with the USA made extradition possible, “but not compulsory.”
|
The USA refuses to extradite the CIA agents – Berlin stays shtum.
|
The US authorities then refused to cooperate with the German investigators - and the German Federal Government shrinked from demanding the agents’ extradition from the US.
|
Much of the German media opinioned in connection with the CIA agents that this is simply the legal state of affairs. Russia’s refusal to deliver a Russian citizen, however, is labelled “Putin’s return to the Cold War” (FAZ 18 July, 2007).
|
Will Federal Chancellor Merkel, when she visits Putin in Sochi at the end of the month, also apply such double standards? (By the way, the German Embassy in Moscow happily hands out the German Basic Law in Russian translation, replete with Article 16).
|
------------------
|
This guest commentary was written by Professor Wolfgang Seiffert. Seiffert, born in 1926, was Professor of International Law in East Berlin until 1978, when he moved to West Germany, where he worked at the Institute of East European Law in Kiel until 1994. Now as emeritus professor he teaches Russian and European Law in Moscow.
|
|
