Costa Rica is preparing to make a big change to who it can send abroad to face trial. The government says it will ask the Legislative Assembly to change the Constitution so that Costa Rican citizens can be extradited for a much longer list of crimes than the two allowed today.
Right now, Article 32 of the Constitution lets Costa Rica hand over its own citizens in only two situations: international drug trafficking and terrorism. Everything else is off the table. Before 2025, even those two were off the table, and no Costa Rican could be sent abroad for anything at all.
The new proposal would add a long list. Under the text President Laura Fernández described when she presented her security package in late July, the added crimes would include money laundering, human trafficking and smuggling migrants, gun trafficking, trafficking in human organs and tissue, contract killing and murders tied to criminal groups, belonging to an international criminal organization, and computer crimes that hit national security or key state systems.
Fernández has been clear about one thing and that is that this would not mean Costa Ricans get shipped abroad automatically. A Costa Rican judge would still have to approve every single case, and that ruling would have to be final. On top of that, the act would have to be a crime in both countries. If something is illegal in the country asking for the person but legal in Costa Rica, the answer is still no. Lawyers call this double criminality, and it stays in place.
The Assembly’s year is split into two kinds of sessions. During special sessions, the president decides which bills get debated. During the regular sessions, which started in August, the deputies set their own agenda — and that is the only window in which a constitutional change can be introduced. So, the Executive handed over five ordinary bills on July 27, held this one back, and said it would come on today, August 3.
There is already a competing idea from inside the governing party. Deputy José Miguel Villalobos wants to go further. Instead of naming specific crimes, his version would allow extradition for any crime that carries more than four years in prison, as long as the other country also punishes it. His argument is not that the government is being too soft, but that a written list will always miss something. He said he needs signatures from other deputies first, and then he will decide whether to file his version on its own or as a replacement for the government’s.
Whatever version moves, none of this happens fast. Changing the Constitution is much harder than passing a normal law. The proposal has to be introduced in ordinary sessions, accepted for debate, studied in committee, and then approved by two-thirds of all deputies, which is 38 out of 57.
Then the whole thing has to be taken up again by the next Assembly, where it faces three more debates and the same two-thirds bar before it actually becomes part of the Constitution. The Constitutional Chamber also reviewed the last extradition change before it advanced, and the same is expected here. Legal experts put the realistic minimum at about two years. The 2025 change took longer than that.
It is worth being clear about what would not change. Judges still decide, case by case. The act still has to be a crime in both countries. Costa Rica does not have the death penalty or life imprisonment, and it will not send someone somewhere they could face either, so the requesting country has to guarantee that first. And this reform on its own would not update the 1971 extradition law. The Assembly had to pass a separate law in late 2025 to make that statute match the constitutional change, and it would need to do something similar again.
For anyone who became Costa Rican by naturalization rather than by birth you are treated the same. That has been true since 2025, and the new text does not change it. There is no separate rule, no lesser protection, and no extra exposure written into the Constitution.
In practice, though, someone who lived, worked or held assets in another country before becoming Costa Rican is more likely to have conduct that both countries treat as a crime, and the offenses being added are mostly cross-border by nature. Holding a second passport neither helps nor hurts. Costa Rica allows dual citizenship, and it does not affect how an extradition request is handled.
The 2025 change stopped being theoretical some time ago. Costa Rica carried out its first extradition of citizens in March, sending former security minister and ex-magistrate Celso Gamboa Sánchez and Edwin López Vega to the United States. By mid-June, officials counted 23 citizens by birth or naturalization who had been detained after extradition requests, and more U.S. requests have arrived since.
The old rule had also let foreign nationals who obtained Costa Rican papers claim the same shield as someone born here, which was a large part of why the ban was lifted in the first place. The Justice Ministry has separately tightened prison rules for inmates with active extradition cases.
For now, this is a proposal and nothing more. Whether it passes in the government’s version, in the broader version Villalobos wants, or not at all will be settled over the next two Assemblies.
