Are draft evaders and mobilised men extradited: a country-by-country guide

No country extradites for draft evasion or failure to report for mobilisation taken on its own. Two independent limits operate: the dual-criminality requirement and the exclusion of military offences from extraditable ones. Both are written into the European Convention on Extradition, the CIS conventions and most bilateral treaties.

That does not mean there is no risk. The risk simply arises elsewhere: from an accompanying ordinary criminal case, from presence in the merged CIS wanted databases, and from immigration measures used instead of extradition without its procedural safeguards.

Surrender is possible only for conduct punishable under the laws of both states — requesting and requested. This is a basic rule of extradition law, and for draft evasion it almost always bites: Serbian, Montenegrin, Georgian, Armenian and Turkish law contain no equivalent of the Russian mobilisation-evasion offence.

What is tested is not the name of the article but the substance of the conduct. So an attempt to recharacterise a missed summons as something more ordinary — fraud or document forgery, say — changes the picture fundamentally: the new charge is what gets assessed, and dual criminality may well be satisfied for it.

The second barrier works independently of the first. The European Convention on Extradition expressly excludes surrender for military offences that are not offences under ordinary criminal law. Draft evasion, failure to report for mobilisation and absence without leave all fall into that category.

The practical value of this rule is that it requires no comparison of legislation: even where the host country has its own liability for draft evasion, surrender on that ground remains excluded. Comparable provisions appear in the CIS conventions and most bilateral treaties.

The CIS states — Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan — differ not in the rules but in how they are applied. Wanted records here are directly linked, and detention follows a database match before anyone assesses how the conduct is characterised. The grounds then get argued from custody, which is a fundamentally different position than arguing them at liberty.

The second source of risk is an accompanying case. If proceedings on an economic or other ordinary charge were opened alongside the summons, that is what will be examined, and none of the reasoning about military offences applies to it. This is what most cases actually look like.

The third is immigration measures. In Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt and a number of other countries, a notice-based detention more often ends in visa cancellation and deportation than in extradition. The destination is set by nationality, so the outcome resembles surrender — but the procedure is shorter and offers almost no judicial safeguards.

First, establish what is actually in the databases. A summons and a criminal case are different things, and the whole risk assessment depends on whether proceedings were opened and on what charge. The public INTERPOL list shows only part of the cases, so only a request to the Commission for the Control of Files (CCF) gives the full picture.

Second, assess a country not by a general sense of 'friendliness' but on three concrete parameters: whether its wanted databases are linked to Russian ones, whether a working extradition channel exists, and whether immigration measures are used as a substitute for it. These three questions give a far more accurate picture than lists of 'safe' destinations.

Third, if a notice already exists and rests on prosecution that fails INTERPOL's own constitutional requirements, it can be challenged through the CCF. That is a separate procedure and does not depend on which country the person is in.