If the rape charges are dropped against Dominique Strauss-Kahn and he returns to France and gets himself elected president of the Fifth Republic, here’s a job for him — repairing the extradition treaty that obtains between America and France. The then-managing director of the International Monetary Fund was thrown into prison in for five days here in New York, until the court breezed past the constitutional prohibition on “excessive bail” and required the Frenchman to post millions in bonds and to pay for armed guards and camera surveillance of himself while the government worked on its case. All this amid talk about how there is no extradition treaty between the two countries.

That turns out to be wrong, at least technically. There is an extradition treaty between the two countries. The latest iteration entered into force on February 1, 2002. But it’s shot full of holes worse than a fromage Suisse. The main flaw is that the treaty states that there is “no obligation upon the Requested State to grant extradition of a person who is a national of the Requested State.” The best America could do if the French didn’t want to send Mr. Stauss-Kahn back here for trial would be to ask the French to put him in the dock over there and try him on French soil for a crime committed at America.

What diplomatic paragon negotiated this treaty, this is not clear in the mists of Foggy Bottom. It was signed at Paris by the Attorney General Janet Reno. We don’t want to be too hard on the laeotropic law-woman. It may be that the French are just such a pain in the neck that no one could have come up with wording to please them.  After all, no less a diplomat than Benj. Franklin was made a fool of when he was assigned the task of negotiating an extradition treaty with the French at a time when, as Max Farrand notes in “Fathers of the Constitution,” the French commissioner, Thieriot, was noisily disparaging American courts.

France even tried to set up a jurisdiction of its own on our soil. The Senate eventually ratified a scheme under which the citizens of the United States and the subjects of the French king, when in the other’s country, should be tried by their respective consuls, as the story is related in “The Citizen’s Constitution.” It says that Farrand quotes Secretary of State Jay, who submitted the long-ago treaty to Congress, as warning that “that it was reciprocal in name rather than in substance, as there were few or no Americans in France but an increasing number of Frenchmen in the United States.”

No doubt the French today will take all this as a vindication of the skepticism in respect of American justice that their forefathers voiced more than two centuries ago. There’s another way to look at it, however. The fruit of that skepticism is that the highest ranking international civil servant to be handed up by France sat at Riker’s Island while prosecutors tried to sort out the allegations of a woman who turns out to have lied to American authorities on a number of occasions and may lack the credibility to back up the charges that the good citizens of New York have, on her complaint, made in a court of law. It cannot be stated too strongly that excessive bail is a prohibition of the Bill of Rights itself. Had a proper extradition treaty been in effect, America’s courts would have had the confidence to return the suspect to France while the facts were pursued. Who better to negotiate such a treaty on behalf of France than Mr. Strauss-Kahn

_______

Updated from an earlier edition.