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As is well known, all European Union (EU) countries have abolished the death penalty. Pursuant to Article 19.2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, they cannot extradite, surrender or deport a person if the extradition might foreseeably lead to a death conviction in the requesting state, or implies the risk of human rights violations such as torture and inhuman and degrading treatment contained in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This article first recalls the main European case law and treaties that establish the prohibition, then argues that this has led to a new model of international judicial cooperation in which human rights play a role at least as important as international relations and criminal prosecution. The article also addresses some of the unresolved problems this model poses: the difficulties of ‘exporting’ human rights; the contradictions and obstacles of conditional extraditions; the lack of ‘system’ and of criteria of case law that supports the new model; and whether or not it is possible to expand human rights protection, already present in extradition, to other fields such as intelligence information sharing or international military operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]