Tajikistan and Hungary have agreed to extradite to each other persons, who have been charged with or found guilty of an extraditable offense.

On Wednesday April 7, Tajik Prosecutor-General Yusuf Rahmon and Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó signed here an extradition treaty, according to the Prosecutor-General’s Office. 

Under this document, Dushanbe and Budapest will extradite to each other nationals of the countries wanted on suspicion of committing crimes and nationals of the two countries serving their jail terms in Tajikistan and Hungary. 

The consensus in international law is that a state does not have any obligation to surrender an alleged criminal to a foreign state, because one principle of sovereignty is that every state has legal authority over the people within its borders.  Such absence of international obligation, and the desire for the right to demand such criminals from other countries, have caused a web of extradition treaties or agreements to evolve.  When no applicable extradition agreement is in place, a sovereign may still request the expulsion or lawful return of an individual pursuant to the requested state's domestic law.  This can be accomplished through the immigration laws of the requested state or other facets of the requested state's domestic law.  Similarly, the codes of penal procedure in many countries contain provisions allowing for extradition to take place in the absence of an extradition agreement.  Sovereigns may, therefore, still request the expulsion or lawful return of a fugitive from the territory of a requested state in the absence of an extradition treaty.

No country in the world has an extradition treaty with all other countries.  

There are two types of extradition treaties: list and dual criminality treaties.  The most common and traditional is the list treaty, which contains a list of crimes for which a suspect will be extradited.  Dual criminality treaties generally allow for extradition of a criminal suspect if the punishment is more than one year imprisonment in both countries.  Occasionally the amount of the time of the sentence agreed upon between the two countries is varied.  Under both types of treaties, if the conduct is not a crime in both countries then it will not be an extraditable offense.

Generally, an extradition treaty requires that a country seeking extradition be able to show that: the relevant crime is sufficiently serious; there exists a prima facie case against the individual sought; the event in question qualifies as a crime in both countries; the extradited person can reasonably expect a fair trial in the recipient country; and the likely penalty will be proportionate to the crime.