Opinion ID: 902495
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Due Process and Extraterritorial Conduct

Text: In support of his due process argument, Ali cites a panoply of cases concerning personal jurisdiction in the context of civil suits. It is true courts have periodically borrowed the language of personal jurisdiction in discussing the due process constraints on extraterritoriality. But Ali’s flawed analogies do not establish actual standards for judicial present purposes, that question is purely academic, as Ali does not tether his argument to a particular version of the due process argument. 7 Ali has not cited—and we have not found—any case in which extraterritorial application of a federal criminal statute was actually deemed a due process violation. Although that does not mean such a result is beyond the realm of possibility, it does suggest Ali’s burden is a heavy one, for he traverses uncharted territory. 26 inquiry; the law of personal jurisdiction is simply inapposite. See United States v. Perez Oviedo, 281 F.3d 400, 403 (3d Cir. 2002). To the extent the nexus requirement serves as a proxy for due process, it addresses the broader concern of ensuring that “a United States court will assert jurisdiction only over a defendant who should reasonably anticipate being haled into court in this country.” United States v. Klimavicius-Viloria, 144 F.3d 1249, 1257 (9th Cir. 1998) (internal quotation marks omitted). What appears to be the animating principle governing the due process limits of extraterritorial jurisdiction is the idea that “no man shall be held criminally responsible for conduct which he could not reasonably understand to be proscribed.” Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 351 (1964) (internal quotation marks omitted). The “ultimate question” is whether “application of the statute to the defendant [would] be arbitrary or fundamentally unfair.” United States v. Juda, 46 F.3d 961, 967 (9th Cir. 1995). United States v. Shi, 525 F.3d 709 (9th Cir. 2008), is most on point. Shi dealt with a due process challenge to the defendant’s prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 2280, which implements the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, Mar. 10, 1988, 27 I.L.M. 672, 1678 U.N.T.S. 222. See 525 F.3d at 717–24. Because “the Maritime Safety Convention . . . expressly provides foreign offenders with notice that their conduct will be prosecuted by any state signatory,” due process required no specific nexus between the defendant and the United States. Id. at 723. In other words, the treaty at issue in Shi did what the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages does here: provide global notice that certain generally condemned acts are subject to prosecution 27 by any party to the treaty. 8 We agree with the Ninth Circuit that the Due Process Clause demands no more. That Ali’s Counts Three and Four concern hostage taking and not piracy in the technical sense does nothing to alter Shi’s logic. The Ninth Circuit did reason that “the acts with which Shi is charged constitute acts of piracy” and “[p]rosecuting piracy was the original rationale for creating universal jurisdiction.” Id. Yet strictly speaking, Shi was not charged with piracy but with the separate, albeit analogous, offense of violence against maritime navigation. See 18 U.S.C. § 2280. And it is the “universal condemnation of the offender’s conduct,” not some theory of universal jurisdiction, that drove the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning. 525 F.3d at 723. That is why the court also cited Martinez-Hidalgo, which dealt with narcotics trafficking, see 993 F.2d at 1056—an offense not generally understood to be subject to universal jurisdiction, see RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW § 404. By that standard, hostage taking is also an offense whose proscription “is a result of universal condemnation of those activities and general interest in cooperating to suppress them, as reflected in widely-accepted 8 Interestingly, Shi even offers some insight into our own Circuit’s precedent. Citing our opinion in United States v. Rezaq, 134 F.3d 1121 (D.C. Cir. 1998), the Ninth Circuit found particularly relevant our decision to apply an aircraft hijacking statute to the defendant “without noting any possible due process concerns.” 525 F.3d at 724. Acknowledging that our silence “may have stemmed from any number of reasons,” the court found it “important to note that, like § 2280, the statute in Rezaq was enacted to implement an international agreement to extradite and to prosecute perpetrators of widely-condemned conduct.” Id. Rezaq is not squarely analogous, however, since “hijacking of aircraft,” like piracy, is a universal jurisdiction offense. See 134 F.3d at 1131; RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW § 404. 28 international agreements and resolutions of international organizations.” Id. § 404 cmt. a. Regardless, Shi’s comparison of § 2280 to piracy was an alternate holding, not a necessary premise to its conclusion that a treaty may provide notice sufficient to satisfy due process—a fact even Ali concedes. See Appellee Br. 37. Ali also complains that though China was a signatory to the relevant international agreement in Shi, Somalia is not a party to the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, 9 meaning his home nation has not consented to U.S. criminal jurisdiction over its hostage-taking nationals. True, as a matter of international law, this case may not be so obvious as those in which “the flag nation has consented to the application of United States law to the defendants.” United States v. Angulo-Hernández, 565 F.3d 2, 11 (1st Cir. 2009). But Ali mistakes the due process inquiry for the customary international law of jurisdiction. “Whatever merit [these] claims may have as a matter of international law, they cannot prevail before this court. . . . Our duty is to enforce the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States, not to conform the law of the land to norms of customary international law.” Yunis, 924 F.2d at 1091. Whatever due process requires here, the Hostage Taking Convention suffices by “expressly provid[ing] foreign offenders with notice that their conduct will be prosecuted by any state signatory.” Shi, 525 F.3d at 723. That is what Shi said. It did not hold that due process depends on the participation of the defendant’s nation in the agreement. 9 Somalia does not join most other nations in this regard. As of May 28, 2013, the treaty has 39 signatories and 170 parties. See United Nations Treaty Collection, International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, available at http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?mtdsg_no=XVIII- 5&chapter=18⟨=en. 29 Finally, Ali asserts that “[f]or non-citizens acting entirely abroad, a jurisdictional nexus exists when the aim of that activity is to cause harm inside the United States or to U.S. citizens or interests.” United States v. Al Kassar, 660 F.3d 108, 118 (2d Cir. 2011). In Al Kassar, these interests were present because “[t]he defendants’ conspiracy was to sell arms to FARC with the understanding that they would be used to kill Americans and destroy U.S. property.” Id. There is good reason to believe that whatever “nexus” due process might demand is not “jurisdictional” in the proper sense of the term. See Delgado-Garcia, 374 F.3d at 1343 (“Appellants’ . . . . assertion is a claim that the due process clause limits the substantive reach of the conduct elements of 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a), not a claim that the court lacks the power to bring them to court at all.”). But even assuming Al Kassar’s characterization is right, the decision only tells us when such 2013) (“‘P ⊃ Q’ does not mean ‘¬P ⊃ ¬Q.’”). And in any a nexus exists, not when it is absent. See New England Power Generators Ass’n v. FERC, 707 F.3d 364, 370 n.3 (D.C. Cir. event, this quote from Al Kassar cannot sustain the expansive construction Ali accords it. Otherwise, the Fifth Amendment would preclude prosecution even of universal jurisdiction offenses like piracy. Al Kassar also states, “Fair warning does not require that the defendants understand that they could be subject to criminal prosecution in the United States so long as they would reasonably understand that their conduct was criminal and would subject them to prosecution somewhere.” 660 F.3d at 119. Other courts have made similar statements. See, e.g., Martinez-Hidalgo, 993 F.2d at 1056 (“Inasmuch as the trafficking of narcotics is condemned universally by lawabiding nations, we see no reason to conclude that it is ‘fundamentally unfair’ for Congress to provide for the 30 punishment of persons apprehended with narcotics on the high seas.”). While Ali protests that the Second Circuit cannot have meant what it said, the consequence of a literal reading is not the limitless prosecutorial power he envisions. Given presumptions like the Charming Betsy and extraterritoriality canons, conduct abroad would only be subject to statutes with clear foreign scope (like § 1203). In fact, since it is those canons and not the Fifth Amendment that have thus far restrained such prosecutorial abuse, Ali’s claim that the government’s position somehow vitiates essential protections seems dubious. Lastly, we mention that the district court initially denied dismissal of Counts Three and Four. See Ali II, 885 F. Supp. 2d at 45 (“Because the hostage taking charges allege the same high-seas conduct for which Ali is lawfully subject to prosecution for piracy, and in light of the notice that the Hostage Taking Convention provides, the Court concludes that there is nothing fundamentally unfair about Ali's prosecution under § 1203.”). It was only once the district court doubted the government’s ability to prove either piracy count that it decided haling Ali into a U.S. court to answer charges of hostage taking would violate due process. See Ali III, 885 F. Supp. 2d at 61–62. Since we have reversed the district court’s decision narrowing the scope of Count Two, the logic of Ali II, which allowed Ali’s charges for hostage taking to proceed, is once again applicable.