Right, thanks for agreeing. And again, neither party in the links you provided were punished for travelling to Cuba. One spent money without a treasury department license and then not only lied about it to the customs agent but smuggled in embargoed goods. The second person was conducting commercial business through a US company. It’s not a big secret that neither of them are allowed.
When you say “the host country didn’t specify a higher age” it’s because the host country says no one can drink. I that’s a reasonable subset of specifying a higher age, the point being that 21 is the maximum that U.S. bases will set.
It is illegal for an American citizen to travel to Canada (or any other country) and purchase Cuban cigars regardless of whether or not they were going to be smoked outside of the US.
From here. (pdf)
But that wasn’t Really’s point. He said ALL overseas bases are 18, unless the host country specifies a higher age. I pointed out one example I knew of that contradicted that statement.
Saudi law actually does specify a legal drinking age for foreign nationals in enclaves (military installations, consular facilities and certain petrochemical corporations’ “company towns”): it’s 21.
However, you are correct that it’s not all bases because base commanders have discretion to adopt a higher drinking age.
That’s all I was saying. It’s sure was great to have drink in Saudi while the “deployed” military personnel were not allowed 
I made a typo, and missed the edit window-- I typed “Iran” for “Iraq.” My husband was stationed at Belad (Anaconda), in Iraq, and the base was dry. If someone tried to mail you booze, you could get in a lot of trouble, and you could not even get mouthwash or cough medicine at the PX that had alcohol. There was a zero-tolerance policy for having alcohol at Belad, and it had to do with some kind of negotiation with the Iraq government regarding having the base there in the first place.
Also, when I was in the Army, we had in practically beaten into us that 21 is the drinking age in the military. However, that was a long time ago, and there were some states that still had a beer-wine age of 18 or 19, so maybe the rule applied to people on pass, or off duty in the US.
However, my husband did say that when he got R&R in Qatar, the beer coupons were only for people over 21. I guess that could have been a command decision, though and not something based on Army policy.
Well, within the US, there are states where the age of marriage (16 in Indiana) is lower than the age of consent in other states (18 in California), so if a 19 year old guy, and his 17 year old bride show up for their honeymoon in California, I suppose things could get awkward, EXCEPT, I asked someone in California once, who happens to be a hotel concierge, and she said that because of inter-state marriage treaties in the US (when you are married in one state, you are married in all), it would not be statutory rape for them to have sex, but it would be a very good idea if they brought their marriage license with them. I think the US also has marriage treaties with other countries, although I’m not really sure just how it works.
The OP didn’t say that one of the countries had to be the US, and my example applied to Israelis.
Huh,didn’t know that. I smoked a few Cubans in Jamaica. The tobacconist even offered a service where, if you purchased a full box they would remove the bands, replace them with non-Cuban bands, and put them in a non-Cuban box. (All done in front of you)
Marc Emery was convicted in the US of selling marijuana seeds by mail-order, although he was living in Canada and the business was located here.
There used to be a few cases, maybe one or two a year, when they feds would make a showcase prosecution of some guy who flew down to Cuba on a charter flight from Toronto and came back and bragged about it, but I doubt if there has been one in the past few years, since it so easy to meet the criteria for legalizing a visit. But it still technically illegal to go there without the proper documentation.
Not one of Cecil’s columns, but there’s a staff report by gfactor that touches on this: In international waters, are you beyond the reach of the law?
I thought I remembered a Cecil column in which he said an American killing another American anywhere in the world could be prosecuted back home, but I can’t find it. Does that sound familiar to anyone?
There’s also the new Fatca law. You can be guilty of not reporting your income made abroad while living in another country. As for a host country extraditing someone back to the US for this, that would be interesting to see.
It’s generally the case that countries will not extradite for revenue offences. It’s not the business of the government of country A to help the government of country B collect its taxes. And this rationale applies in spades where the government of country B attempt to impose tax reporting/paying obligations on the residents of country A , and then asks the government of country A to extradite those of its residents who won’t comply. Not a chance. Might be different if the reporting requirements were not related to revenue but were, say, part of a suite of measures aimed at combatting criminal or terrorist money-laundering.
Every once in a while, a South Korean celebrity gets dragged in for prosecution upon returning to South Korea after going on a gambling trip in Las Vegas or similar places. Turns out it’s against Korean law for Korean citizens to gamble anywhere in the world.
It doesn’t happen often, but there are examples of US citizens being extradited or detained for evading US taxes, which includes just failing to report (example).
On why country A should help country B collect its taxes…maybe country A also would benefit from having tax cheats extradited. Or maybe country B incentivizes country A’s help.
Does anything ever come of these prosecutions or is it just for the lulz?
I’ve always been kind of fascinated by Korea’s weird gambling system. Some places, like Jeju, are lousy with casinos, but god forbid a Korean citizen set foot in one, it’s against the law for them to gamble.
As far as I know, only one casino in the entire country is permitted to allow Korean nationals in. The rest exist solely to bleed foreigners dry.
The “default” rule is that extradition is not granted for fiscal offences, tax legislation having traditionally been seen as of a regulatory nature, with breaches not involving moral turpitude. There has been a trend in recent years for bilateral extradition treaties to contain a provision departing from the default, and making some or all fiscal offences extraditeable. Initially this extended to money-laundering or market-corrupting offences; increasingly it extends to all fiscal offences. The US has been at the forefront of this trend, seeking to get such a provision inserted in any extradition treaty it negotiates.
The prudent tax cheat will therefore do his homework before deciding which country to flee to. If it’s the US whose clutches he is trying to escape, he should choose a country which is (a) politically and socially close enough to the US to have had an extradition treaty with them for many decades, but (b) not big enough or important enough for the extradition treaty to have been periodically revised and renegotiated. If the extradition treat with the US dates from the 50s or 60s or even 70s, it’s unlikely to allow for extradition for revenue offences. If from the mid-90s onwards, it probably does. In between those dates, go and read it.
Note that this discussion is relevant to the tax cheat who cheats while in the US, and then flees. If a US citizen breaches US tax law because, while living in (say) France, he fails to report his income to the IRS, it’s very unlikely that the French would extradite him. This is not so much because the offence is a revenue offence as because of the rule of double criminality; the corresponding behavour by an expatriate Frenchman is not an offence, and in general governments won’t extradite for behaviour which is not prosecutable in their own country.
The same with the casinos in Nepal. Those are for foreigners only. I think it used to be that way in Singapore, but now they let Singaporeans in but after they pay a large admission fee not charged to foreigners.
Yep. Huge fines, sentencing to terms of imprisonment (suspended until they screw up yet again). And, of course, massive backlash from the infamous K-netizens.
Oh, I forgot to mention the former Miss Korea who got hounded for appearing in a porn flick. That’s illegal under Korean law for Korean citizens, even if the flick is produced in another country.
I won’t know how outraged and appalled to be until I’ve watched that movie a few times.