India-Bangladesh Extradition Treaty, 2013

The India-Bangladesh Extradition Treaty, 2013 creates reciprocal duties to surrender persons wanted for prosecution or punishment in the other country. These duties apply only to an extraditable offence and remain subject to treaty safeguards and the requested state's domestic extradition law.

Core obligation to extradite

Each state must, upon a valid request, extradite a person found in its territory who is accused or convicted of an extraditable offence in the requesting state.

• An offence is extraditable when it is punishable under the laws of both states by imprisonment for at least one year.
• For a convicted person, extradition requires that at least six months of the sentence remain to be served.
• Dual criminality depends on whether the underlying conduct is criminal in both states, even if the offences have different names or legal classifications.

Limits and grounds for refusal

The surrender obligation is qualified by protections against abusive or legally impermissible extradition.

• Extradition may be refused for an offence of a political character, although specified serious violent offences cannot be treated as political offences.
• The treaty protects persons where a request is connected with persecution based on matters such as race, religion, nationality or political opinion.
• Extradition is restricted where the person has already been finally dealt with for the same offence, or where the offence is exclusively military in character.

Procedural and post-surrender duties

The requesting state must provide the prescribed request and supporting documents through the agreed channels, while the requested state must decide and execute the request according to the treaty and its domestic law.

• In urgent cases, the requesting state may seek provisional arrest pending submission of the formal extradition request.
• After surrender, the rule of speciality generally permits prosecution only for the offence for which extradition was granted, related lesser offences, or offences subsequently consented to by the requested state.
• Further extradition to a third country generally requires the consent of the state that originally surrendered the person.
• The 2016 Protocol simplified the documentary requirements for making an extradition request.