AMX wrote:Broomstick, if you check the US laws, I'm sure you'll find a part that's aimed at US citizens abroad; if your laws are anything like ours, it'll include things like treachery, terrorism, paedophilia, and a few others.
Giving Austria a bad image happens to be punishable by removal of citizenship.
While US laws are similar in many respects to European law, there are significant differences.
For example - many of our laws are not Federal in nature but on the State level. Crimes such as murder, rape, and theft are NOT crimes against the United States as a whole but are considered crimes against the individual state, and are prosecuted on the state and not the national level. In many ways, the states composing the United States act as separate nations. If, for example, a man commits a murder in Ohio and flees to Arizona he can NOT be prosecuted for murder in Arizona - he must be
extradited to Ohio, much as if he had fled to Canada and needed to be extradited from there to the US. In practice, this extradition is seldom refused but it
has been in the past, and the Federal courts have upheld the rights of the individual states to refuse extradition if they choose to do so.
Then we have oddities like Louisiana - in most of the US, the basis of most law is English common law. But in Louisiana the basis of most laws in the state is the Napoleonic civil code of France. But that's a little off topic....
In other words, when I cross from Indiana to Illinois, the laws change. In Indiana, it is a crime to sell alcholic beverages on Sunday - but it is entirely legal in Illinois. If I live in Indiana and sell liquor on Sunday in a store I own or work at in Illinois I can NOT be prosecuted for breaking Indiana law because I wasn't in Indiana. If I, a citizen of Indiana, step into my car on Sunday morning and drive to Illinois where I purchase a variety of alcholic beverages and drive back to my home in Indiana the same day I likewise have broken no law on either side of the border.
Back before
Roe v. Wade, when the majority of US states outlawed abortion to one degree or another and considered illegal abortion to be first degree murder, it was a common practice for women who could afford to do so to travel to a state where abrotion
was legal and have one performed -- because even though the act was considered murder in their state of residence it was NOT murder where the deed was done and therefore they could
not be prosecuted for it. Which is
precisely why the anti-abortion groups in the US want a
constitutional amendment to outlaw it, because that is the only way to guarantee that no one in the US can legally obtain one. If you left it up to the states you'd have a patchwork of abortion/no abortion states, just like before.
Again, as I pointed out in an earlier post, US law stops at the border of the US. If a US citizen goes abroad and performs an act illegal in one or several locations in the US, or even under Federal law (that's the law that applies to all 50 states - and applies to only a small number of crimes), but that act is performed abroad, outside of US jurisdiction,
that citizen can not be prosecuted for that act under US law (though they certainly could be prosecuted under the laws of the locality where they committed the deed). So yes, it would apply to acts on US military bases and on the grounds of embassies and the like, but no -
US law does not apply outside the US - even for US citizens.
This fact, by the way, is the basis the Bush administration holding certain terror suspects outside the US - US law regarding legal interrogation methods do not apply. The Supreme Court did decide that Gitmo in Cuba
was under US jurisdiction, and thus US law (it's a US military base, after all), but it wouldn't apply to holding someone in a crude cell in the basement of a house rented in, say, Pakistan, when said house had no connection to a US base or embassy. That's the
legal stance - whether that's a moral stance or not is a different question.
Perhaps, in this respect, the law of the US are significantly different from the laws of various European countries.
I will, however, mention terrorism - if an act of terror is committed against the US, on US soil, then the US feels US law applies - because the act occured on US soil. And extradition will be sought. (Or even a war fought over it, such as in Afganistan). However, the legal picture becomes quite murky if the act of terror occurs abroad. And there is NO basis in US law for prosecution if a US citizen engages in terrorist acts against another country - such a person most probably has broken the law
in the country the committed the act and the US would certainly consent to extradition, but they could NOT be prosecuted under US law because, in that case, US law does not apply.
And finally, treason - again, treason is a crime against the United States, and it's probably the one offense that would apply abroad. It's also the only offense where the death penalty is written
into the Constitution. In order to
completely eliminate the death penalty in the US you would have to amend that document, which is not an easy task to do. Even if every state in the Union eliminated the capital punishment it would still remain for the one crime because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and supercedes all others.
I will grant, though, that the Austrians are free to decide the qualifications for citizenship in their own country, and if they feel so offended as to strip the current governor of California of his Austrian citizenship there is absolutely nothing anyone here can do about that. If Arnold has to decide between his loyalty to Austria and his loyalty to the US and/or California that is HIS problem - and one of the reasons why the US has historically discouraged dual citizenship. We don't want people in our government (at any level) with divided loyalties (though obviously it does happen, since we permit people holding dual citizenship to hold public office).
You're obviously not getting my point.