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Where can an American go to avoid being extradited back to the US?

Edward Snowden, the contractor identified as the source of leaks about the US electronic surveillance program, may face extradition to the US wherever he goes. Here are six places that have proven that extradition to the US isn't easy.

3. Hong Kong

Victor Fraile/Reuters/File
The Hong Kong skyline is seen from the Peak tourist spot, in June 2008.

 Snowden may just decide to stay put, which may very well be his best option. As The Christian Science Monitor reported, Hong Kong wasn't the worst choice for hiding out:

If Snowden chooses to ask for political asylum, says Professor [Simon] Young, head of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at Hong Kong University, “he is going nowhere” in the foreseeable future. A recent appeals court ruling, he explains, means that “the government cannot return anyone who claims that he will be persecuted” in the country he came from.

Though technically under the sovereignty of China, Hong Kong is still quite autonomous, and according to Article 6 of the extradition treaty it signed with the US in 1996, fugitives will not be extradited if the crimes they are accused of are political. If Snowden plays the political dissident card right, he may be able to call Hong Kong his new home.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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