International Law: Unchecked Immunity

Foreign diplomats in Washington piled up a total of 11,000 traffic tickets last year, an average of 100 per mission, with Russia topping the list. Not a single fine was paid. The tickets were all sent to an office in the State Department, where an official stamped CANCELED on them and dispatched them to the police in daily stacks. Reason for the wholesale ticket fixing: diplomatic immunity, the protective legal cloak that covers not only ambassadors but minor officials and even embassy employees from virtually all kinds of civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

Large Nuisance. Immunity is an ancient principle of international law, tracing back beyond the days when pharaohs ruled over Egypt. But in Washington, as in other cities where diplomats live in large numbers, it can be a large nuisance. Items:

> An African diplomatic family that moved into a Washington apartment was unable to cope with the stove, and built a cooking fire on the floor. The flames were extinguished before the kitchen caught fire, but when the Africans moved, they refused to pay for the damage that had been done. They invoked diplomatic immunity when the landlord threatened to sue.

>A Virginia man ran up some $5,000 in hospital bills and other expenses after his car was rammed by a diplomat’s auto, but because of diplomatic immunity he could not sue, and he never collected a cent.

>In the late 1950s, the burly, hard-drinking son of the Irish ambassador acquired the irritating habit of belting Washington cops whenever he had been belting the bottle. He got away with it because diplomatic immunity extends to an ambassador’s children—and cousins and aunts too, if they live in the ambassadorial residence.

No Plates. “Nobody pretends the diplomat needs absolute and total immunity from everything,” John E. Killick, counselor of the British embassy, told a panel discussion at the District of Columbia Bar Association, and the U.S. is beginning to agree with him.

In 1961 a U.S.-sponsored international conference at Vienna drafted an immunity-restricting treaty, which has already been ratified by 21 nations. Under the treaty, diplomats will be accountable for property they own or private business they transact in the host country outside the bounds of their diplomatic duties. Embassy employees will retain immunity only while they are on official business.

In Washington last week, efforts to apply this standard to diplomatic traffic violators ran into a solid roadblock. Foreign ambassadors had received a letter from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, notifying them that in the future diplomats would be expected to pay their traffic fines. In the first ten days, 205 cars with DPL plates were ticketed, and 46 fines were actually paid. But by then diplomatic indignation was running so high that the dean of the diplomatic corps, Nicaraguan Ambassador Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa, waited on Dean Rusk in person with a protest. Sheepishly the State Department backed up. The police department sent out a directive to be “diplomatic to the diplomats” once again. Only if there was a blatant violation or if the diplomat was not on official business would summonses still be in order. As to whether “business” was “official”—that, of course, was up to the diplomat to say.