Word: noriega
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Usually old dictators go to Paris to while away their days in opulent exile. But it looks as if Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama will spend the next decade in a French prison instead of one of the Parisian apartments he bought with drug money in the 1980s. On September 9, Noriega is slated for release from a Miami federal prison, where he spent the past 17 years on drug trafficking charges stemming from the shipment of millions of dollars worth of cocaine from Colombia to the United States. In 1999, he was convicted in absentia on the money laundering...
...Attorney's Office in Miami successfully met the requirements for extraditing Noriega to France in demonstrating the French had probable cause for charging the deposed general for money laundering. There is also a valid extradition treaty between the U.S. and France. The next step will be for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sign off on Noriega's surrender to France...
However, legal scholars maintain that sending Noriega - currently the world's only recognized prisoner of war - to France would violate the terms of the Geneva Convention if Paris fails to accord him POW status. Despite assertions from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami that the French government intends to honor the Geneva Convention, Noriega's Miami-based lawyer Frank Rubino maintains that may not be the case. "The French Ambassador to Panama - Pierre-Henri Guinard - publicly stated Gen. Noriega will not be treated as a prisoner of war but as a common criminal," Rubino told U.S. Magistrate William Turnoff...
Whether the French call Noriega a POW is more than academic, says Detlev Vagts, who teaches international law at Harvard. "You have to refrain from transferring a POW to a country that you think won't treat him as a POW," Vagts told TIME. "We returned a lot of German POWs to the French at the end of World War II. There are plausible charges that the French did not treat them as they should - kept them a long time and caused them to do dangerous work in mining...
...There is a principle here that certainly transcends Noriega and that's strict interpretation of the Geneva Convention," says Jon May, Noriega's Fort Lauderdale-based attorney. "Strict interpretation protects our soldiers around the world... In [The Black Hawk Down incident] in Somalia we went to warlords and said we expect you to respect the Geneva Convention. During the first Desert Storm issues of the Geneva Convention came up all the time. There may be no sympathy for Gen. Noriega, but that doesn't mean we don't respect his rights...