President Laura Fernández asked lawmakers on Monday to widen the narrow list of crimes for which Costa Rica may hand its own citizens over to foreign courts, proposing a constitutional amendment that would add money laundering, human trafficking, arms trafficking, contract killing and cybercrime to the two grounds that exist today.
The president arrived at the Legislative Assembly mid-morning accompanied by her cabinet, police directors and members of the unit the government calls Fuerza Élite, and delivered a second package of six security bills. The extradition proposal was the centerpiece of her presentation but was not among the files formally handed over, because legislative procedure does not allow constitutional reforms to be processed during extraordinary sessions. The government said it will file that text on Monday, August 3.
Costa Rica has permitted the extradition of its nationals only since 2025, and only for international drug trafficking and terrorism. Fernández wants to add seven further categories: money laundering; human trafficking and migrant smuggling; illegal arms trafficking; trafficking in organs, tissues and human stem cells; contract killing and homicides linked to organized criminal structures; participation in transnational criminal organizations; and cybercrime, cyberterrorism and cyberfraud that compromise national security or the critical infrastructure of the Costa Rican state.
Fernández framed the proposal as a move against criminal structures rather than a general loosening of protections for citizens, telling lawmakers that Costa Rican nationality is a right and a source of pride for millions of honest citizens and <cite index=”1-1″>not a shield for members of transnational criminal organizations.
She said the mechanism would remain exceptional and would require a final ruling from Costa Rican courts in every case, describing it as not an automatic or generalized extradition of nationals. The proposal also preserves the dual criminality requirement, meaning the conduct must be a crime both in Costa Rica and in the country requesting the person.
The prohibition Fernández is seeking to narrow further dates to the aftermath of the 1948 civil war, when the drafters of the current constitution barred the forced removal of citizens from national territory. That ban held for more than seven decades. The Legislative Assembly approved the amendment to Article 32 unanimously in its final debate on May 15, 2025, and the reform was promulgated as Law 10730 and published on May 28 of that year. A companion reform harmonizing the 1971 Extradition Law with the new constitutional text cleared Congress the following November.
On March 20 of this year, former Supreme Court magistrate and former security minister Celso Gamboa Sánchez and Edwin Danney López Vega were handed to United States agents at the San Jose Airport and flown to Texas aboard a DEA aircraft, the first extraditions of Costa Rican nationals in our history.
Both face cocaine conspiracy charges in the Eastern District of Texas. The appeals court that authorized the transfer required written assurances from Washington that neither man would face life imprisonment or a sentence longer than 50 years, the ceiling permitted under Costa Rican law, and that time served in pretrial detention here would be credited against any sentence.
That same ruling exposed a question the courts have not settled. Judges accepted a defense argument on non-retroactivity in the case of a third man, Álvarez Alfaro, declining to apply the 2025 reform to conduct predating it. Whether nationals can be extradited for acts committed before May 2025 remains contested, and any expansion of the grounds would inherit the same dispute.
Constitutional amendments move slowly in Costa Rica by design. The text must win a two-thirds majority in three debates, then be taken up again and approved in three more debates after the Assembly’s annual turnover, meaning no reform filed in August could take effect before the second half of the current legislative period at the earliest.
The five bills Fernández did file on Monday address the ordinary criminal system. One would replace the preliminary hearing in the Criminal Procedure Code with a single pre-trial hearing before the same court that will hear the case, which the president said would cut duplicated steps that delay resolutions. Another would require electronic ankle monitoring for anyone granted an alternative to prison after a final sentence, replacing arrangements such as signing in every fifteen days.
A third would classify illegal mining as organized crime and raise penalties for extraction, processing, financing, transport or storage to between six and ten years, with confiscation of machinery and registry freezes on linked properties. A fourth would allow parents jailed over unpaid child support to serve under electronic monitoring instead, on the reasoning that a father in prison cannot earn the money he owes.
The fifth restores older police rank titles and requires a university degree and fifteen years of service for senior command posts. A planned reform of the Dirección de Inteligencia y Seguridad Nacional was pulled from the package and deferred to a third round of bills.
The government has now sent twelve security bills to Congress since mid-June. Homicides, meanwhile, are running below last year’s pace. The Judicial Investigation Agency counted 401 killings through July 6, fifty-two fewer than the same point in 2025, with settling of scores recorded as the leading motive and San José, Limón and Puntarenas the most affected provinces.
