1. On Monday, according to a DOJ press release published on the Bureau of Industry and Security website, the United States finally extradited Steve Lim, a Singaporean national who had been languishing in a jail in Batam, Indonesia. As we reported here and as noted in the DOJ press release, Lim was under indictment in the United States for shipping radio modules from the United States to Iran. In October 2014, Lim had hopped a ferry from Singapore to Batam to attend a trade show and was nabbed at the ferry terminal. An Indonesian judge ultimately permitted, in July 2015, Lim’s extradition notwithstanding the absence of an extradition treaty between Indonesia and the United States

What the DOJ press release fails to mention is that a court in Singapore had refused to extradite Lim in 2011. Singapore, which does have an extradition treaty with the United States, has a dual criminality requirement for extradition. Because the export of the radio modules from Singapore to Iran was not illegal under the law of Singapore, the request by the U.S. for extradition was refused. Lim would still be in Singapore had he not made that trip to Indonesia. What this illustrates is that although U.S. law enforcement authorities claim jurisdiction over foreign nationals who, without ever setting foot in the United States, export items from the U.S., the assertion of this jurisdiction is not without international controversy.

Photo Credit:User:Abelard Fuah, via Wikimedia http://bit.ly/23fG242 licensed under CC BY-SA-3.0 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/][cropped]

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