On March 20, 2026, Costa Rica put its former security minister on a plane to Texas. Celso Gamboa, once a Supreme Court magistrate, became the first national his country ever extradited, ten months after lawmakers rewrote Article 32 of the constitution to allow it.
Ecuador had crossed the same line a year earlier. After a 2024 referendum lifted its constitutional ban, Quito sent gang leader José Adolfo “Fito” Macías to a Brooklyn courtroom in July 2025.
Mexico skipped extradition altogether, flying 92 cartel defendants north in three batches between February 2025 and January 2026 under its National Security Law.
Refusing to surrender one’s own citizens is among the oldest rules in extradition law, and civil-law states from Berlin to Brasília still write it into their constitutions. Yet the group that applies the rule without exception is smaller than most “non-extradition country” lists suggest.
Four measures show how strong the shield really is: what the statute says, what the record shows, who counts as a national, and what happens to the case once extradition is refused.
What the Statute Says
Bans on extraditing nationals come in two grades. Some sit in a constitution, where only an amendment or a referendum can move them. Others live in an ordinary statute that gives way the moment a treaty says otherwise.
🇷🇺 Russia has the bluntest constitutional text. Article 61 provides that a citizen “may not be deported from Russia or extradited to another State,” and Moscow repeated the line in its declaration to the European Convention on Extradition.
No exception exists for treaties, for particular crimes, or for international courts.
🇧🇷 Brazil protects the native-born absolutely. Article 5, item LI of the 1988 constitution says no Brazilian shall be extradited, then carves out naturalized citizens in two cases: an ordinary crime committed before naturalization, and proven involvement in drug trafficking.
Congress repeated the bar for native-born Brazilians in the 2017 Migration Law.
🇹🇷 Turkey’s Article 38 says no citizen shall be extradited “because of an offense,” with a single exception for obligations owed to the International Criminal Court.
But the catch is Ankara never joined that court, so the exception lies dormant. Nothing in the text separates a Turk by birth from a Turk by investment.
🇨🇳 China’s Extradition Law states that a foreign request “shall be rejected” when the person sought is a Chinese national.
🇯🇵 Japan’s Act of Extradition bars surrender of a Japanese national unless a treaty provides otherwise, and Tokyo’s treaties with the United States and South Korea leave the decision to its discretion.
Common-law countries never adopted the rule at all. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia extradite their own citizens as a matter of course, a tradition their former Caribbean colonies inherited.
Where the Ban Bends
🇩🇪 Germany shows how a flat ban acquires exceptions. Article 16(2) of the Basic Law opens with “No German may be extradited to a foreign country.”
A second sentence then lets parliament provide otherwise for EU member states and international courts.
That second sentence exists because of the European Arrest Warrant framework, in force since 2004, which removed nationality as a ground for refusing a prosecution warrant inside the EU.
Cyprus, Germany, and Poland each had to amend their constitutions to comply. Within the bloc, the shield is gone.
Outside it, the wall still stands, and Brexit was the proof. The EU’s latest notification to the United Kingdom, published in December 2025, names nine member states that will not surrender their own nationals at all: Germany, Greece, France, Croatia, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland, and Sweden.
Austria and the Czech Republic will do so only if the person consents.
Five states attached no nationality condition whatsoever: Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, and Malta. Bulgaria withdrew its earlier reservation.
🇵🇱 Poland moved between camps. Listed among the absolute refusers in 2021, it has since August 3, 2023, allowed surrender of a Polish national to the UK where the offense took place outside Polish territory.
🇳🇱 The Netherlands uses a return guarantee. Dutch nationals can be surrendered for prosecution only if the requesting state promises to send them home to serve any sentence. 🇮🇱 Israel’s Extradition Law applies the same condition to citizens who are also residents.
🇨🇭 Switzerland leaves the choice to the accused. Article 25 of the federal constitution permits extradition of a Swiss citizen only with his consent. Withholding it does not close the file, since Swiss prosecutors can take the case over.
🇮🇹 Italy gave the protection away by treaty. Its 1983 agreement with the United States states that neither side may decline extradition because the person is its own national.
Latin America prefers crime-specific carve-outs.
🇨🇴 Colombia has allowed the extradition of nationals since a 1997 amendment to Article 35. 🇪🇨 Ecuador followed by referendum on April 21, 2024, and 🇨🇷 Costa Rica’s 2025 reform opened Article 32 for international drug trafficking and terrorism only.
San José is already widening the gap. A bill filed on August 3, 2026, would add money laundering, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and contract killing to the list. It needs 38 of 57 deputies in two successive legislatures, which local lawyers expect will take at least two years.
What the Record Shows
A statute tells you what a government is allowed to do. Its extradition record tells you what it actually does, and the two diverge more often than the texts suggest.
🇫🇷 France has the longest unbroken record among Western democracies. According to the International Bar Association analysis cited above, Paris has not extradited a French citizen, outside the European Arrest Warrant framework, since the 19th century.
When two French pilots convicted in the Dominican Republic’s “Air Cocaine” case escaped home, the government announced they would be tried in France.
🇷🇺 Russia’s record is equally clean and less cooperative. Moscow refused Britain’s 2007 request for Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, citing Article 61. No trial followed at home.
🇧🇷 Brazil holds the line but closes the impunity gap. Italy could not extradite the footballer Robinho after his rape conviction became final, so it asked Brazil to enforce the sentence instead.
The Superior Court of Justice agreed by nine votes to two on March 20, 2024, and police arrested him the next day to begin a nine-year term.
🇱🇧 Lebanon’s reputation kept Japan from even filing a request for Carlos Ghosn after his 2020 escape.
🇯🇴 Jordan has refused Washington since 2017 over Ahlam al-Tamimi, wanted for a 2001 Jerusalem bombing. Amman’s position, the US State Department reports, is that its highest court read the constitution as forbidding the extradition of Jordanian nationals.
Then come the countries whose records have turned.
🇨🇷 Costa Rica extradited no citizen in its history until March 2026. By mid-June, officials counted 23 Costa Ricans by birth or naturalization detained on extradition requests by the US.
🇲🇽 Mexico’s recent 92 transfers bypassed the 1978 extradition treaty entirely, and defense lawyers complained that their clients had no court to appeal to once the plane had landed.
🇨🇴 Colombia sits at the far end of the scale. Gustavo Petro’s government signed 913 extraditions to 31 countries, more than 560 of them to the United States, according to figures presented during the handover of power. His successor, Abelardo de la Espriella, says he signed 105 in his first 53 days.
Even the loudest bans carry asterisks. Brazil extradited Claudia Hoerig to the United States in 2018 after ruling that she had forfeited her native Brazilian nationality by becoming American. Lebanon handed over Ali Salameh in 2019, reasoning that he was also a US citizen.
Three Tests the Usual Lists Skip
Three further tests decide whether a ban protects someone who acquired his nationality later in life.
1. When did you become a national? France fixes nationality on the day of the alleged offense, under Article 696-4 and its treaties with the United States and Canada, so a later passport protects nobody. Brazil gets there differently: a naturalized citizen stays extraditable for ordinary crimes committed before naturalization. Costa Rica’s old rule gave naturalized fugitives the full shield, which the Tico Times calls a large part of why lawmakers lifted the ban.
The 1957 European Convention on Extradition defaults to the date of the extradition decision, though states can narrow that by declaration, as France did. Check which clock applies before assuming a new citizenship counts.
2. Are you also a national of the state that wants you? Dual nationality can cancel the protection. Lebanon justified the Salameh surrender because he was American as well as Lebanese. Rome’s Court of Appeal held in March 2026 that former Brazilian congresswoman Carla Zambelli’s Italian passport was no obstacle and that her Brazilian citizenship strengthened Brasília’s claim.
Italy’s Court of Cassation later blocked her surrender, annulling one approval in May 2026 and sending the second back in July, over fair-trial concerns and imprecise prison assurances. Nationality played no part.
3. Does refusal end the case? Rarely. Most nationality clauses carry the principle aut dedere aut judicare: extradite or prosecute. The France-US treaty obliges a refusing state to refer the case to its own prosecutors on request, and the EU-UK agreement requires the same.
Switzerland can prosecute or enforce the foreign sentence at home, Vanuatu’s Extradition Act allows a local trial as if the conduct had occurred there, and Robinho is serving Italy’s sentence in a São Paulo state prison. Russia’s handling of Lugovoi is the exception.
Where Investor Citizenships Stand
Citizenship by investment (CBI) jurisdictions split along the same common-law and civil-law line as everyone else, with one extra variable: how easily the citizenship itself can be taken away.
David Lesperance of Lesperance & Associates says a new passport rarely changes the outcome. Unless an extradition treaty specifically bars the surrender of a country’s own nationals, as France’s did for Roman Polanski, acquiring a second citizenship “will generally not effectively stop an individual from ultimately being returned to the requesting country.”
The five Caribbean programs offer no nationality shield. Their extradition statutes descend from British law, which never treated nationality as a ground for refusal. When India sought Mehul Choksi, who became a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda through its program in 2017, Prime Minister Gaston Browne said publicly that he would be extradited once his appeals ran out.
Even where nationality is no bar, the requested country weighs the request first. Lesperance notes that it checks whether a treaty exists and whether the request “meets the requirements outlined in that treaty.”
India and Antigua had no treaty, only an extradition agreement, whose terms get the same scrutiny. Courts can also take years deciding whether a charge is politically motivated, whether the accused will get a fair trial, or whether he faces punishment such as the death penalty.
🇰🇳 St. Kitts and Nevis moved further in that direction this summer. Its National Assembly passed the Extradition (Amendment) Bill, 2026 on July 30 to simplify how requesting states present evidence. Ministers stressed that the courts, and no politician, will keep the final say.
🇻🇺 Vanuatu sits in the middle. Its Extradition Act lists citizenship among the grounds on which the Attorney General may refuse surrender, which makes the protection discretionary. Port Vila showed in March 2025 how it uses discretion when Prime Minister Jotham Napat ordered Lalit Modi’s passport cancelled, saying that avoiding extradition is no legitimate reason to seek citizenship.
Cancelling a passport is the route Lesperance flags for countries with no treaty at all. A requested state can still send someone back by stripping his passport, which he calls “easier than denaturalization,” by cancelling his residence, or by simply deporting him.
Vanuatu did exactly that in July 2019, deporting six Chinese nationals whom Beijing accused of running an internet scam. Four of them were Vanuatu citizens, and the government revoked their citizenship first.
🇹🇷 Turkey offers the strongest text in the CBI market. Article 38 covers every citizen, and no provision ranks investors below the native-born. The weak point is the citizenship: Ankara cancelled or withdrew 6,134 CBI citizenships in August 2026, of which 1,413 belonged to main applicants.
🇯🇴 Jordan also protects nationals at the constitutional level, on its highest court’s reading. Investors on the project routes, however, hold only a temporary passport for the first three years.
🇰🇭 Cambodia supplied this year’s cautionary tale. Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi had been a naturalized Cambodian since 2014. A royal decree revoked his citizenship in December 2025, and on January 6, 2026, he was on a plane to China.
🇲🇹 Malta, which ended its investor citizenship route in 2025, appears among the five EU states that reserved no right to withhold nationals from the UK.
Revocation is the pattern that matters. A state with a constitutional ban has two ways to hand over an inconvenient new citizen: amend the constitution, or remove the citizenship. Only one of those requires a parliamentary supermajority.
