By: Bryan Diaz
On March 6, 2025, Sudiksha Konanki, a 20-year-old American college student, vanished while vacationing in the Dominican Republic during spring break. In the early hours of the morning, surveillance footage showed her walking to the beach with Joshua Steven Riibe, a 22-year-old fellow U.S. citizen and the last person confirmed to have seen her. When Riibe returned alone to the resort around 5:00 a.m., suspicion quickly fell on him. Dominican authorities responded by confining him to a hotel room for more than ten days. Although he was never formally charged with a crime, his prolonged confinement raised serious questions about whether he was effectively being detained, albeit without the formalities of arrest or judicial process.
That scenario raises a provocative legal question: Can a U.S. federal court issue a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a U.S. citizen who is allegedly being detained or restricted by a foreign government or under unclear circumstances abroad? This post focuses on the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus under U.S. law and how international treaty obligations and doctrines like comity limit the ability of U.S. courts to intervene in such cases. It also offers a comparative perspective on how other countries approach similar cross-border legal challenges, particularly when the rights of their own citizens are implicated abroad.
At its core, the writ of habeas corpus allows individuals to challenge the legality of their detention before a court. Protected by the U.S. Constitution, it serves as a crucial safeguard against unlawful imprisonment. But its power is not unlimited—especially when the individual is outside U.S. territory.
Two landmark Supreme Court cases illustrate the tension around habeas corpus and its extraterritorial application. In Johnson v. Eisentrager, the Court held that enemy combatants held in Germany by U.S. forces had no right to habeas corpus in U.S. courts. Decades later, in Boumediene v. Bush, the Court reached the opposite conclusion for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, emphasizing that the United States exercised full control over the facility, even though it was technically on Cuban soil.
The takeaway is that habeas corpus can extend beyond U.S. borders, but only under narrow circumstances, typically when the U.S. has both custody over the individual and control over the location. That’s what makes its application to a case like Joshua Riibe, so uncertain. A U.S. civilian being held, formally or informally, foreign authorities, in a foreign country, falls well outside the traditional boundaries of habeas relief. Still, the legal questions raised in such a scenario are provocative: What if an American citizen is being unlawfully held abroad with no due process? And what role, if any, can U.S. courts play?
The United States is not alone in grappling with the limits of legal protections for citizens abroad. Countries like the United Kingdom and Canada, both of which maintain strong civil liberties frameworks, offer useful points of comparison.
In the U.K., courts have historically been reluctant to extend habeas corpus to British citizens detained abroad unless the British government is directly involved in the detention. However, U.K. courts have been more active in reviewing whether the government is doing enough to assist citizens facing legal trouble overseas, particularly when human rights concerns are implicated.
Canada, meanwhile, has a more defined doctrine of “Charter rights abroad.” In Khadr v. Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that the government had a duty to protect a citizen, Omar Khadr, detained at Guantánamo Bay and criticized its complicity in violating constitutional rights. Still, Canadian courts stop short of ordering foreign governments to act. [2010] 1 SCR 44 (Can.).
These examples highlight a common thread: while direct legal remedies like habeas corpus are rarely extended across borders, courts in other democracies do engage with the rights of their citizens abroad, often by holding their own governments accountable for inaction or complicity.
The case of Sudiksha Konanki and the detention of Joshua Steven Riibe underscores the legal and moral complexity of protecting U.S. citizens beyond national borders. While the writ of habeas corpus remains one of the most powerful tools for challenging unlawful detention, its reach is sharply limited when the person in question is held abroad by a foreign government. As current U.S. doctrine stands, courts are unlikely to intervene unless the United States itself exercises control over both the detainee and the place of detention.
Yet the questions raised by such cases are not easily dismissed. They test the boundaries of constitutional protections and expose the gaps in international legal coordination. Comparative perspectives from countries like the U.K. and Canada show that while direct legal relief is rare, democratic governments are not entirely without responsibility. Ultimately, the burden may not fall solely on courts, but also on diplomatic channels, bilateral agreements, and public pressure to ensure that the rights of citizens do not vanish with them when they cross borders.
