Friday, June 19, 2009

extradition

Question of the day:
Will you be extradited for a crime should the action not be considered a crime in the country from which you are to be extradited?

This train of thought started with an amusing customer-waitress banter with a mother of three, who had arrived for lunch sans children.
"Sold the kids for scientific experiments, then?"
- "No, no, if I'd done that, I wouldn't be here. I'd be off, far away, on a plane probably... on my way to a country with no extradition treaty."
"Any particular one? The Bahamas? Is that even one of them?"
- "Perhaps China? Would that work?"

And so the ponder began?
Without including China, and its 'One Child Policy' in a kind of strange Orientalist hand-waving in which all countries in a block of the 'exotic other' become capable of all kinds of 'savagery', such as the abuse or slavery of small children, and can therefore be utilised by the Occidental evader of just punishment as imposed by their own nation and its citizens, who simply attempt to impose the trappings of their self-determined semblance of 'the good life'...
If we were to consider that it is possible that there may be a country in which the selling off of children for experimentation, scientific or otherwise, is not contrary to any law in that sovereignty.
Then, and only then, might we consider the above question that commenced this train of thought.

Would this mother still be likely to be extradited, should that imaginary country - regardless of judgements of the relative (de)merits of her mothering - have an extradition treaty with the nation to which she 'belongs', for the crime which is only a crime in one of the two nations...?


While I am aware that, with a few key pieces of mailing, or even a decent web search, I might resolve this dilemma once and for all. I can't help but also become aware that this is in fact, more of an intrigue, more of a piece of wondering about the working of the social world with its open-endedness intact. Don't find out the answer for me, world. The seeking to know, the awareness of the possibility of discovery... that's the more valuable of the options for me.

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