Immunisation shots for diplomats
When the intricacies and delicacies of international diplomacy momentarily confound us, where else can we turn for stress relief but to the moral clarity of Lethal Weapon 2?
‘‘Diplomatic immunity,’’ cries the horrid diplomat played by dear old Joss Ackland, holding up his little card with almost bored irritation while injured cop Mel Gibson writhes helplessly on the ground below him.
Whereupon his partner Danny Glover, handgun trained on the villain, thrusts out his jaw, rotates his head, and shoots Ackland just above the right eye anyway. Then he delivers one of those one-liners in which action fans, particularly in the 1980s, rejoiced. ‘‘It’s been revoked.’’
There’s long been good box-office money to be made from lunkheaded vengeance fantasies when they tap into life’s frustrations. This one is particularly well chosen because when a diplomat escapes the scrutiny of our own justice system, it rankles our sense of fairness good and hard.
It’s happened again. Our police were hoping US attache Colin White could help them with their inquiries into an assault in Lower Hutt, but his country, reportedly at White House level, invoked diplomatic immunity.
The results for White were far from inconsequential. His protective homeland has yanked him from his posting, which entailed working with our own spooks at the Government Communications Security Bureau. And, for what it’s worth, our police have handed over ‘‘relevant information’’ about his actions to US authorities.
Since 2011, in five cases where alleged crimes were serious enough to carry a sentence of at least 12 months, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has succeeded in only one attempt to have a nation waive immunity. Malaysia did so in the hugely publicised case of Muhammad Rizalman bin Ismail, who later admitted a case of indecent assault and served home detention.
On the flip side – and we cannot deny there is one – a New Zealand envoy left Suva under diplomatic immunity, and in the face of police opposition, after a man fell to his death from his balcony in 2015.
Whether we like it or not, this system exists worldwide for a reason. We send our diplomats into countries that are less protective of individual rights than we are. Immunity agreements protect them, but the sour downside is that the system potentially protects transgressors in our midst and, at the same time, denies justice to some our own citizens.
Certainly, there are times when a country does waive immunity, though the US is not conspicuous among them. So we’re left to take what consolation we can from the knowledge that the typically headlines humiliating for the individual and their country aren’t career-enhancing.