In his 1903 State of the Union Address, President Teddy Roosevelt said, “No man is above the law and no man is below it. … Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked for as a favor.”
That is, unless you are a foreign ambassador. Foreign ambassadors are diplomats who represent the interests of their home country in foreign settings. Under the 1961 Vienna Convention, diplomats are immune from prosecution in their host country. It is imperative that we alter this detrimental decision because of egregious acts committed by diplomats and for international accountability.
Let’s recall a 2019 instance where diplomatic immunity saved an American. Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a U.S. government employee, was driving on the wrong side of the road in Northamptonshire on the night of Aug. 27. Her car collided with a motorcycle ridden by Harry Dunn, a 19-year-old Briton, killing him.
Sacoolas claimed diplomatic immunity, allowing her to flee the country without any consequence.
What Sacoolas did is, unfortunately, not an outlier. An article from the ACLU in 2013 reported that “in a disturbing number of cases diplomats have abused this privilege by luring women … with promises of good jobs but trap them in their homes by confiscating their passports … Diplomatic and consular officials who engage in such abuse escape responsibility for these crimes because immunity laws protect them.”
Other specific cases reveal slavery; in the summer of 2005, Kumari Sabbithi, Joaquina Quadros and Tina Fernandes were brought to the United States under false pretenses, where they were subjected to physical and psychological abuse by the Al Saleh family – Kuwaiti diplomats – and forced to work against their will. In the winter of that year, fearing for their lives, each of the women individually fled the household. Major Waleed Al Saleh and his wife Maysaa Al Omar, the aggressors, each have diplomatic immunity.
The U.S. Department of State estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year. However, in cases in which the traffickers have diplomatic immunity, the victims, unlike other victims of trafficking, have no avenue for redress or compensation for the abuse and exploitation they suffered. Domestic workers – people who work mainly in household positions – are extremely vulnerable to exploitation for a variety of reasons, including unfamiliarity with their domestic and international rights, cultural and language barriers, and, in many cases, long work hours in isolation from their peers.
The United States is giving leeway to a system that allows known human traffickers to violate our constitution by having slave laborers in their homes and then fleeing the country without any consequences.
The only way to prosecute and get around diplomatic immunity is to have a request accepted by the sending country of the diplomat. For example, an English diplomat can’t be prosecuted in the U.S. without the permission of England. This doesn’t happen, according to the ACLU. They say, “Such requests are rarely made or granted. Even when victims have been able to escape their abusers and seek restitution, immunity laws are often used to prohibit courts from so much as considering their claims.”
As Geoffry Robertson of The Guardian put it in 1999, “Diplomatic immunity may have been expedient during the Cold War, to protect diplomats from being framed. But it produced the result that foreign officials – and their spouses and children and chauffeurs – may fearlessly engage in serious crime, using their inviolable embassy premises and baggage for drug and gun-running and money laundering, or assist terrorists with whom their state is in political sympathy.”
People deserve to have their grievances addressed – there is no single person living in the U.S. who deserves to be above the law. For the recourse of victims – most of whom will never be able to come forward – we must abolish diplomatic immunity.
