USA - Bounty Hunter

Remember the bounty hunter of the old Wild West movies? These rooting-tooting-shooting tough guys, usually employed by bail bondsmen, tracked down and captured outlaws and brought them to justice – for a reward, of course. Well, guess what? According to the US government, it is all legal. In fact, the statute authorizing bounty hunters – passed in the 1860s – is still on the books, though in a slightly more civilized format.

Fast forward to the present. The new outlaws are Stanley Tollman, former director of England’s Chelsea soccer club and owner of the Red Carnation hotel group; and his wife Beatrice. The couple is wanted in the US for bank fraud and tax evasion; and has been fighting extradition in British courts. Now the US has told Britain that it can ‘kidnap’ foreign citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the US. A senior lawyer for the US government has the court of appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under US law, because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. Until now, it was assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only for terror suspects, under "extraordinary rendition". Now, for the first time, the US government has made it clear that the law applies to anyone suspected of a crime by Washington. In other words, foreign governments can take niceties like habeas corpus and stick it up their rear ends.

There have been similar incidents in the past too. In 1990, a Mexican doctor was abducted by US authorities in Guadalajara, Mexico and flown by the DEA to Texas. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1992, that the Mexican had no legal remedy to protest his abduction.

I don’t want to pass any moral judgment on this type of arbitrary action by a democratic government. However, I cannot help wondering how the US would react if one of its citizens was abducted in a similar manner.