Extradition in the USSR’s Treaties on Legal Assistance with Non-“Socialist” States

Abstract

Extradition in the USSR's Treaties on Legal Assistance with Non-"Socialist" States GEORGE GINSBURGS* F OR THE GREATER PART of the Soviet regime's diplomatic career, the idea of entering into formal engagements visa -vis "bourgeois" states which called for the mutual procurement of extradition services seemed outlandish. Even as late as 1987, a Soviet university textbook on international law cautioned that: "The practice of rendition of criminals encountered and encounters difficulties in those cases where states of different social types face each other, for the very concept of crime changes depending on which historically social type the given state fits. That is why cooperation between states in the sphere of struggle against criminality is possible only on those questions and in that scope which the states themselves consider suitable as far as they are concerned." 1 By then, however, the Soviet Union had already broken out of the old shell of quarantining such bilateral operations strictly to the premises of the so-called socialist community and had broadened the market to include states that did not belong to the inner sanctum. Thus, the treaty on legal assistance with Iraq, signed on June 22, 1973, contained a comprehensive package of reciprocal commitments governing interstate rendition procedures. 2 The precedent set the tone for a string of