On Monday, a U.S. Federal District Court Judge in Delaware sentenced Amir Hossein Ardebili, who was the subject of this earlier post on Export Law Blog, to five years in prison, less time served and credit for good behavior, based on Ardebili’s guilty plea to U.S. charges arising out of attempted exports of military goods to Iran. During Ardebili’s statement at the sentencing hearing, he frequently burst into tears, even at one point crying so much that a break was taken.

Iran immediately denounced the sentence and announced that it would try three American hikers that wandered into Iran last summer, implicitly linking Ardebili’s fate to that of the three U.S. hikers now held in Iranian prisons According to an Iranian press agency, Iran Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Ramin Mehmanparast, said that the jail sentence handed down yesterday was “illegal.” Tehran has also argued that under international law officials in Georgia were obliged to return Ardebili to Iran rather than giving him to U.S. agents, reports Iran’s Press TV network.

Iran’s claim of a requirement to return Ardebili under international law is not quite on the mark since there really isn’t such a recognized right in extradition matters. As generally understood, international law holds that no country is obliged to extradite anyone. This understanding of international law explains why there are a hundreds of bilateral extradition treaties, although the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Georgia. That doesn’t mean that a country, such as Georgia, cannot voluntarily hand over someone in the absence of a treaty. However, that is normally only done after a representation of reciprocal treatment by the country requesting extradition.

U.S. law does permit, in limited circumstances, extradition from the United States in the absence of a treaty with the country requesting extradition. Under 18 U.S.C. § 3181(b) the U.S. will allow such extradition from the United States of foreign persons but only for violent crimes that are not deemed political offenses. Certainly the crime that Ardebili was alleged to have committed was not a violent crime and so an extradition of a person from the U.S. on export charges by a country without an extradition treaty would be illegal under U.S. law. This means that the U.S. couldn’t really make a commitment of reciprocal treatment to Georgia to support its request for a non-treaty extradition of Ardebili. If the situation were reversed, U.S. law would actually prohibit the extradition

The problem created here is that the shaky grounds for U.S. jurisdiction over Ardebili detract from our own country’s argument that Iran should return the hikers. After all, Iran’s claim of jurisdiction to hold the hikers is stronger than the U.S. claim of jurisdiction over Ardebili even if Iran’s substantive claim that the hikers broke the law is dubious. After all, the hikers were captured in Iran whereas Ardebili was lured into Georgia and arrested there.

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