Nepal-India Extradition Treaty (1953) and the 2025 Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement

Nepal and India share an open border of roughly 1,850 kilometres across which people, goods and, inevitably, criminals move with little friction. Because there is no passport or visa requirement for citizens of either country, fugitives wanted for murder, fraud, trafficking or terrorism financing have long treated the frontier as an easy escape route. For decades the two governments have relied on a patchwork of informal understandings and case-by-case cooperation between police forces rather than a functioning legal framework.

Two instruments define, in principle, how the two states are meant to cooperate on crime: an extradition treaty for surrendering wanted persons, and a mutual legal assistance (MLA) mechanism for the practical machinery of investigation such as collecting evidence, recording statements and serving documents across the border. For most of the post-1953 period Nepal had neither a live extradition treaty nor a mutual legal assistance agreement with India in force, which made cross-border prosecutions slow, contested and often unenforceable in court.

This entry explains the two headline documents: the Treaty of Extradition between the Government of India and the Government of Nepal, signed in 1953 and long since lapsed, and the Agreement on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, whose text was finalised at home-secretary talks in New Delhi in July 2025 and formally signed in February 2026. It also covers the repeated pledge to modernise the extradition treaty and the sticking points that have blocked it for two decades.

The Treaty of Extradition between the Government of India and the Government of Nepal was signed in Kathmandu on 2 October 1953 (BS 2010 Ashwin), shortly after Nepal opened to the world following the fall of the Rana regime. It was signed for Nepal by then Prime Minister Matrika Prasad Koirala and for India by its Ambassador, B. K. Gokhale. For a long time Nepal was, apart from Bhutan, effectively the only neighbouring country with which India maintained an extradition arrangement of this kind.

The treaty followed the classic list-based model of the era: extradition was available only for a fixed schedule of named offences, commonly counted at around 17. The listed crimes centred on serious offences against the person and property recognised in mid-twentieth-century criminal law, and did not anticipate the modern catalogue of transnational crime. Because it names specific offences rather than adopting the modern 'dual criminality' threshold (any act punishable above a certain jail term in both countries), the 1953 list has become a poor fit for present-day prosecutions.

The full text is preserved in international treaty databases such as CommonLII and the UNODC South Asian (SAARC) compendium on international cooperation in criminal matters. Alongside the offence schedule, the treaty carried the standard limitations of its time, including protections around political offences and provisions on how requests were to be made and considered by the two governments.

The 1953 treaty was drafted for a very different criminal landscape and is now widely described by officials on both sides as expired and outdated, its validity having run out decades ago. Its narrow, enumerated offence list omits categories that dominate today's cross-border caseload - money laundering, cybercrime, terrorism financing, organised drug and human trafficking, and complex financial fraud - so a modern fugitive can often slip through simply because the alleged crime is not on the schedule.

Efforts to replace it are not new. A revised draft extradition treaty was initialled at the home-secretary level in 2005, but it was never brought into force because the two governments could not agree on several provisions. The negotiations were repeatedly deferred, and the 2005 draft has remained 'on the table' ever since, leaving the lapsed 1953 text as the nominal but non-functional reference point.

The single most persistent obstacle has been the treatment of third-country nationals. India has pressed for the ability to seek the surrender of individuals wanted by Indian authorities even when they are not Indian citizens; Nepal has resisted, arguing this conflicts with its own legal framework and could expose it to demands over people who merely transit Nepali territory. In the absence of a working treaty, most actual handovers have been managed informally, through mutual understanding between the two countries' security agencies rather than a court-tested legal process.

Rather than wait for the harder extradition question to be resolved, the two governments moved first on mutual legal assistance. During home-secretary-level talks in New Delhi that concluded on 23 July 2025 - the first such meeting in nine years - senior officials finalised the text of the Agreement on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters. Nepal's delegation was led by Home Secretary Gokarna Mani Duwadee and India's by Home Secretary Govind Mohan.

A mutual legal assistance treaty does not itself hand over a person; it provides the legal plumbing for an investigation or trial to reach across the border. The Nepal-India MLAT is designed to enable the collection and exchange of evidence, the sharing of information, service of documents, and coordination between the two countries' competent authorities during investigations and court proceedings. Officials have framed it as a tool against transnational crime including human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism and terror financing, cybercrime, money laundering and financial fraud.

The timing was shaped in part by Nepal's return to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 'grey list' of jurisdictions under increased monitoring in February 2025. A functioning mutual legal assistance channel with a major partner such as India supports Nepal's efforts to demonstrate credible international cooperation on money laundering and terror financing, one of the areas FATF scrutinises.

Finalising a treaty text is only the first step; both instruments must clear domestic approval before they bind either state. After the July 2025 talks, the agreed text had to be endorsed by the respective cabinets and then signed at the appropriate level for it to come into operation. Nepal's Cabinet approved the Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement on 16 October 2025 (BS 2082), clearing the way for signature.

The agreement was formally signed on 18 February 2026. On behalf of the Government of Nepal it was signed by Joint Secretary Binod Kumar Bhattarai, and on behalf of the Government of India by the Indian Ambassador to Nepal, Naveen Srivastava. With the MLAT concluded, Nepal moved from being one of the few neighbours of India without such a pact to having a formal legal-assistance channel in place.

Signature does not automatically translate into day-to-day use. Like most such treaties, the MLAT depends on each side designating central authorities to send and receive requests, aligning it with domestic procedure, and building the practical habits of cooperation between prosecutors and police. The agreement's real test will be whether it speeds up evidence-sharing in live cases rather than merely existing on paper.

At the same July 2025 talks that produced the MLAT, both sides also committed to working towards an early conclusion of a revised extradition treaty to replace the lapsed 1953 text. A modern extradition treaty would be expected to move away from the fixed offence list toward a dual-criminality standard, add the transnational offences missing from the 1953 schedule, and set out clearer, time-bound procedures for requests, provisional arrest and surrender.

The core disagreement, however, remains the same one that stalled the 2005 draft: whether Nepal must surrender third-country nationals sought by India. Until that is bridged, or a compromise on scope is found, the revised extradition treaty is likely to lag behind the mutual legal assistance agreement. Officials have described concluding it as a priority, but have also acknowledged that further negotiation is needed to resolve the outstanding differences.

For now, the practical picture is asymmetrical. Nepal and India have a signed framework for legal assistance in criminal matters, but no live, enforceable extradition treaty; the surrender of wanted persons continues to depend heavily on informal cooperation between security agencies. Closing that gap with a modernised extradition treaty is the stated next objective for both governments.