Harry Dunn: UK ‘feared a crash at base 25 years ago’
FOReIGN Office officials ‘prophesied’ a road crash involving Americans attached to a UK military base – almost 25 years before Harry Dunn lost his life in a collision outside it.
A ‘secret agreement’ between the UK and US governments over the diplomatic immunity status of a new cohort of staff at RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire was struck in 1995, a court heard yesterday.
But it left some in Whitehall worried about the prospect of base employees or their families committing ‘motor crimes’.
the revelation came in the first round of a legal battle brought by the parents of 19-year-old Harry against Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Northamptonshire Police for allegedly acting illegally over the departure of US diplomat’s wife Anne Sacoolas from the UK after she claimed diplomatic immunity.
At the High Court in London, tim Dunn, 50, and Charlotte Charles, 45, argue that the Foreign Office ‘acted unlawfully by proceeding as if Anne Sacoolas conclusively had immunity and/ or advising other state bodies that she did’.
they say this prevented Northamptonshire Police ‘from reaching an informed view as to the immunity issue’.
Mrs Sacoolas, 42, admitted being at the wheel of a Volvo SUV that was on the wrong side of the road when it collided head on with Harry’s motorcycle on the brow of a hill last August – but she flew home to Virginia in the US 19 days later.
the court heard the motherof-three had followed her husband Jonathan – who was an
Fatal smash: Anne Sacoolas ‘administration and technical officer’ at RAF Croughton – out of the base in separate vehicles.
She has since been charged with causing death by dangerous driving but the US has refused to extradite her. Geoffrey Robertson QC, for Harry’s parents, said the legal case ‘turns on the interpretation’ of the 1995 secret agreement, made as a result of a ‘US request to add up to 200 technical officers as diplomatic agents at RAF Croughton...’
He said that at the time Britain was ‘deeply concerned about this unprecedented request and the danger of media interest if crimes (in particular, road traffic- related crimes) were committed by agents and/ or their dependants’.
Mr Robertson added: ‘essentially, they prophesied exactly what happened in this case.’
He said the UK government was willing to agree to the request ‘on the understanding that the US government waives immunity from criminal jurisdiction of those employees for acts performed outside of the jurisdiction of their duties’. William
Crowe Junior, the then US ambassador to Britain, duly agreed to those terms.
Mr Robertson argued that under the agreement Mrs Sacoolas did not have diplomatic immunity. But Mr Raab has told Parliament that in his view an anomaly in the agreement meant that she did.
Lawyers for the Dunn family applied for full disclosure of documents and an expert witness statement about the 1995 agreement plus documents and texts relating to the Foreign Office’s response to Harry’s case.
But Mr Justice Flaux, sitting with Mr Justice Saini, dismissed all the applications. the court will decide whether Mrs Sacoolas was entitled to diplomatic immunity at a full judicial review hearing later this year.