How diplomats commit crazy crimes living abroad - and get away with it

You’re looking for a parking spot in Queens and notice a pedestrian guarding an available space, waiting for a car that has not yet arrived. What do you do?

If you’re like most people, you keep driving. But, in 1987, Afghan envoy Shah Mohammad Dost pulled over and demanded the pedestrian surrender the parking spot immediately, insisting that being a diplomat gave him the right to take it. When she refused, he drove into her and took the spot.

Margaret Curry, 42, was sent to the hospital after being hit by Dost’s ’78 Lincoln. Dost wasn’t even questioned about the assault — thanks to his diplomatic immunity.

There are around 100,000 foreign diplomats, including their dependents, currently living in the US — and some, like Dost, have broken local laws and faced zero consequences.

The loophole leads many diplomats to cheat the system, according to Brian Klaas, author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. “In the five years from 1997-2002, UN diplomats were cited for 150,000 parking tickets that went unpaid,” Klaas writes.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to bully them into paying, and in 1997 he accused the UN of “acting like the worst kind of deadbeats.” But Giuliani’s tough words had little effect.

The problem wasn’t that diplomats can’t be issued parking tickets. Far from it. From 1997 till 2002, they racked up a tab totalling well over $18 million. But while parking laws can be applied to foreign representatives, Sean Murphy, an international law professor at George Washington University, says “there is a bar on enforcement.”

A diplomat’s willingness to engage in corruption “was an indication of their home country’s norms or culture rather than their own personal values,” the study concluded. In other words, “the illegal parkers come from a society where officials are taught that the rules don’t apply to them,” Klaas writes.

In 2002, Mayor Bloomberg initiated a “three strikes, you’re out” rule, towing diplomatic cars linked to parking violations and confiscating their plates — the status symbol for behaving badly. Three years later, parking violations by diplomats dropped 90 percent. It turned out “culture matters, but so do consequences,” Klaas writes.

Normally, though, diplomatic crimes aren’t so easily handled.

Under the Vienna Convention, ratified in 1961 by 187 countries, diplomats “shall not be liable to any form of arrest or detention.” It’s essentially a “get out of jail free” card, protecting them from criminal prosecution for everything from domestic abuse to money laundering to even littering.

Shoplifted raincoats from a New York department store? An Iranian envoy did that in 1984. Claim that your German Shepherd, who’d bitten several neighbours in Pelham, New York, was protected by immunity and any action against the dog would lead to “possible international consequences”? A delegate from Barbados made that argument (and won) in 1975. Smuggle 40kg of cocaine from Mexico to New York in a diplomatic pouch? Ecuador diplomats tried it ( and got away with it) in 2012. Diplomats from Zaire ( Congo) declined to pay rent for the Manhattan high-rise they occupied since 1982, and despite owing over $400,000 to their landlord a decade later, refused to pay or vacate, claiming diplomatic immunity. (They left in 2005, without paying a cent.)

Ask any diplomacy expert and they have a favourite tale. Craig Barker, a dean and international law professor at London South Bank University, mentions a “classic bizarre case” from 1984, in which Nigerian diplomats, along with some Israeli co-conspirators, attempted to kidnap a former Nigerian minister, exiled in London, by hiding him in a shipping crate. “The UK authorities chose to open them and found the dissident and an Israeli anesthetist inside.”

The offenses have run the gamut from involuntary manslaughter — in August of 2019, Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US diplomat, struck and killed a 19-year-old motorcyclist with her car in Northamptonshire — to more benign violence — 63-year-old Xiang Xueqi, the wife of Belgium’s ambassador to South Korea, slapped employees at a Seoul boutique last April after they accused her of shoplifting. Both women claimed diplomatic immunity, and though Sacoolas faces a court case in the UK, both have gotten off scot-free.

The headlines might be shocking, but statistically, incidents of diplomat malfeasance are rare, Barker said. “In 2018, the last year for which figures are available, there were only three cases of ‘serious’ crimes committed by persons entitled to diplomatic immunity,” he said. “Serious being any case that could result in a sentence of 12 months or more.”

The public generally doesn’t approve of diplomatic immunity. Back in 2013, according to a poll, 41 percent of Americans thought diplomats should be prosecuted for their crimes. In 2019, in response to the Sacoolas case, a new poll found that 63 percent of Americans and 84 percent of Brits thought immunity should be revoked. But the experts say it’s not that simple.

“The sanctity of diplomats and diplomatic missions is a bedrock of peaceful relations among states,” says Joshua Muravchik, a foreign policy expert and distinguished fellow at the DC-based World Affairs Institute. “It makes it possible for hostile countries to communicate, which they often wish to do, without fearing that their representatives will be molested.”

The Vienna Convention was never intended to protect criminals. For the 15,000 American diplomats serving in over 150 countries, it offers protection from being thrown in jail if a host nation suddenly decides to punish the US for political reasons.

“Thankfully,” Klaas writes, “that protection doesn’t usually lead to ambassadors going on the prowl as serial killers.” But, he adds, “When we say, ‘Nobody is above the law,’ that’s not true. Some people are.”

When people are above the law, they can do some very bad things.

In 1967, just five years after the Vienna Convention became international law, Sao Boonwaat, a Burmese ambassador to Sri Lanka, suspected that his wife was having an affair. So he shot her and burned her body in a funeral pyre in his backyard.

When the Sri Lankan police arrived, Boonwaat informed them that his home was Burmese territory. He soon returned to his home nation but according to a Senior Deputy Inspector, “Whether he went to jail, no one seems to know.”