diplomatic immunity

diplomatic immunity, in international law, the immunities enjoyed by foreign states or international organizations and their official representatives from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are present.

The inviolability of diplomatic envoys has been recognized by most civilizations and states throughout history. To ensure exchanges of information and to maintain contact, most societies—even preliterate ones—granted messengers safe-conduct. Traditional mechanisms of protecting diplomats included religious-based codes of hospitality and the frequent use of priests as emissaries. Just as religion buttressed this inviolability, custom sanctified it and reciprocity fortified it, and over time these sanctions became codified in national laws and international treaties.

Protections afforded to foreign envoys varied greatly in the ancient world. Greek heralds, who were recognized as inviolable by the city-states, procured safe passage for envoys prior to negotiations. Typically, the inviolability of envoys was not respected by third parties. As empires in China, India, and the Mediterranean grew more powerful, diplomatic protections decreased. The law of diplomatic immunity was significantly developed by the Romans, who grounded the protection of envoys in religious and natural law, a system of norms thought to apply to all human beings and to derive from nature rather than from society. In Roman law the unassailability of ambassadors was guaranteed even after the outbreak of war.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, envoys and their entourages continued to enjoy the right of safe passage. A diplomat was not responsible for crimes committed before his mission, but he was answerable for any crimes committed during it.

During the Renaissance permanent—rather than ad hoc—embassies developed, and the number of embassy personnel, as well as the immunities accorded to them, expanded. When the Reformation divided Europe ideologically, states increasingly turned to the legal fiction of extraterritoriality—which treated diplomats, their residences, and their goods as though they were located outside the host country—to justify diplomatic exemption from both criminal and civil law. The doctrine of quasi extra territorium (Latin: “as if outside the territory”) was developed by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) to sanction such privileges, and during the 17th and 18th centuries other theorists turned to natural law to define, justify, or limit the increasing number of immunities. These theorists used natural law, with its appeal to universal moral injunctions, to argue that the representative nature of a diplomat and the importance of his functions—especially that of promoting peace—justified his inviolability; the same moral law underscored his obligations to the larger community. Because immunities varied greatly between jurisdictions, and because some jurisdictions offered few if any immunities, to protect their envoys countries increasingly resorted to laws—such as the Act of Anne (1709) in England, which exempted ambassadors from civil suit and arrest—or treaties—such the 17th-century agreement between England and the Ottoman Empire that forbade searches of the British embassy, exempted the servants of embassies from taxes, and allowed the ambassador wine for his own use.

Although the French Revolution (1789) challenged the basic foundations of the ancien régime, it reinforced one of its hallmarks, diplomatic inviolability. By the late 19th century, the expansion of European empires had spread European norms and customs, such as diplomatic immunity and the legal equality of states, throughout the world. Because of the increasing number of privileges and immunities enjoyed by envoys, some theorists sought to undermine the concept of extraterritoriality by highlighting its attendant abuses, such as the granting of asylum in embassies to notorious criminals and smugglers. In particular, legal positivists—who argued that the law of diplomatic immunity should be based on treaties and precedent—strove to reduce what they considered the excessive privileges of envoys. By the late 19th century, positivists were dominating international jurisprudence, largely because they avoided the problem, characteristic of natural-law theorists, of confusing international morality with international law and because they based their theories on the actual practice of states.

The position of diplomats and the public respect they enjoyed declined substantially in the 20th century. This development, combined with certain other factors—including the explosive growth in the number of new states after World War II, an increase in the size of diplomatic missions, and the increasing prevalence in international law of the view known as functionalism (according to which diplomatic privileges should be limited to those that are necessary to enable a diplomat to accomplish his mission)—led eventually to attempts to restrict diplomatic immunities in international treaties. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) restricted the privileges granted to diplomats, their families, and staff. Avoiding controversial issues such as diplomatic asylum and focusing on permanent envoys rather than on ad hoc representatives or other internationally protected persons, the convention accorded immunity from criminal prosecution and from some civil jurisdiction to diplomats and their families and lesser levels of protection to staff members, who generally were given immunity only for acts committed in the course of their official duties. Since the 19th century, diplomatic privileges and immunities have gradually been extended to the representatives and personnel of international organizations.

Despite these developments, from the late 20th century diplomats and representatives of international organizations continued to be subject to prosecution and officially sanctioned harassment in some countries, a situation perhaps best exemplified by the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehrān, Iran, in November 1979 by supporters of the Islamic revolution in that country and the holding of more than 50 American diplomatic personnel as hostages for 444 days.