r/pics doesn't let me post this there because I haven't been active and deleted my post automatically (understandable under their rule, although I disagree with their rule). So, in the spirit of this post, here's a picture of the taxi carrying #TeoPeter (pictured right), bass player and vocalist of #Compact, one of the more popular rock bands in #Romania, after being hit by the #FordExpedition driven by #USMarine #ChristopherVanGoethem, at that time detached at the #USEmbassyInBucharest.

The incident happened in the early morning of December 4, 2004, at the intersection between the Polonă Street and Dacia Boulevard in downtown #Bucharest. Van Goethem hit the taxi while speeding on a red light, and the police later found he was under the influence of alcohool (basically he was #drunkdriving ). Van Goethem was in the car with his mistress, although he was married at that time. As per procedure, the US Marine was taken by the police at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine to collect biological samples. At the location, Van Goethem opposed, arguing that they weren't using the medical equipment provided by the US Embassy. Later, he was escorted outside by a #US security officer, and taken to an #American military base. From there, he fled to #Germany before any charges were filled by the #Romanian authorities. They did request the lift of the diplomatic immunity of Van Goethem, but the American authorities refused the request. He faced a trial back in the US instead, where after 2 years, the #MartialCourt of #Virginia dropped the #manslaughter and #adultery charges (even though he admitted drinking in the same night of the accident). However, the soldier was found guilty of making false official statements to investigators and obstructing justice, but received only a letter of reprimand.

At that time, the Romanian society was really pissed about the incident. Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu, the Romanian prime minister at the time, declared that the court verdict in the #USA was "surprising and quite bizarre at least". Yet, the Romanian authorities had nothing else to do than to respect the #ViennaConvention regarding diplomatic relations, and also went forward with keeping the relation with the US at a normal level. The link between #Romania and #America remains to this day (as I'm writing this) a strong one, even one of the strongest remaining links the US has with a European country (given the state of things).

So yes, this is another instance of a European country (mine, respectively), #EUMember and #NATOAlly #Romania, doing absolutely nothing for the US (well, nothing against it either FWIW).
RE: eupolicy.social/users/jmaris/s…

A U.S. ICE raid on what South Korea claims is its diplomatic cultural annex in L.A. has sparked a serious diplomatic crisis. Seoul has formally protested, recalled its ambassador, and accused Washington of breaching the Vienna Convention.

Read more: https://readbitz.com/us-immigration-raid-on-seouls-la-facility/
#Diplomacy #SouthKorea #US #ViennaConvention #InternationalLaw

Case of the Day: Yukos v. Russia

Bill Dodge has a good post at the Transnational Litigation Blog about today’s case of the day, Yukos Capital Ltd. v. Russian Federation (D.D.C. 2025). The case was for confirmation of an arbitral award. Yukos served process on Russia under 28 U.S.C. § 1608(a)(4) through diplomatic channels. But the method was unusual. Typically, when you have to serve process in this way, you request the State Department to make service, and the State Department arranges for the US embassy abroad to deliver the papers, with a diplomatic note, to the Foreign Ministry. This is what the State Department’s regulations generally provide (22 C.F.R. § 93.1), though the regulation provides that “If the foreign state so requests or if otherwise appropriate,” the State Department can instead deliver the papers and the diplomatic note “to the embassy of the foreign state in the District of Columbia.”

Here, the State Department delivered the papers with a diplomatic note to the Russian embassy in Washington. I don’t know why the State Department did things that way. In any event, Russia argued that the court lacked personal jurisdiction because it had not been properly served. It argued that the service was improper because Russia refused delivery of the papers at the embassy, and thus it was not “appropriate,” to use the word of the regulation, to serve process at the embassy, especially in light of the inviolability of the embassy premises under the Vienna Convention.

The judge rejected Russia’s position. Some of his reasoning is not persuasive to me. For example, he argued that requiring service on the foreign ministry in Moscow instead of the embassy would make § 1608(a)(4) duplicative of § 1608(a)(3), which provides for service on the Foreign Minister. But that seems clearly wrong to me. Section 1608(a)(3) provides for service on the foreign minister by postal channels, while § 1608(a)(4) provides for service by diplomatic channels. Also, 1608(a)(3) calls for service on the foreign minister, a distinction that has been inportant in prior cases. 1

He also reasoned that the regulation merely regulated the State Department’s internal processes and that a violation of the regulation—if there was a violation—would not render the service improper. But it seems to me that the contents of the regulation might be evidence of what the United States position is on the requirements of customary international law.

I agree with everything Bill writes in his post, though I think that the issue really boils down to the question of what customary international law has to say, a point the judge did not really address. The U.N. Convention on the Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Properties (which is not a binding treaty) suggests that service of process in the circumstances of cases like this must be by “transmission through diplomatic channels to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the State concerned.” But maybe the Convention doesn’t accurately state the customary international law on this point. Bill writes: “Even if one could show widespread practice limiting transmission of service through diplomatic channels to foreign ministries, one would have to show that such practice was followed from a sense of legal obligation (opinio juris) in order to establish a rule of customary international law.”

I don’t know the answer to the customary international law question. But surely the safer course is to transmit the document to the Foreign Ministry rather than the embassy, if only to avoid needless litigation about service.

#FSIA #RecognitionAndEnforcement #Russia #ViennaConvention

@HarriettMB I do expect @antidiskriminierung and @AuswaertigesAmt to affirm #AntiDiscrimination #laws and either force the #US embassy & consulates to comply with #Germany's laws or close and cease operations.

• After all, #Ambassadors are guests and #Embassies are to be operated with #acceptance and #respect of the host country as per #ViennaConvention.

If the #USA refuses to acknowledge that, they there is no basis for #diplomacy and I urge #contractors to press charges for #blackmail and #coercion if they get approached to fulfill for such #racist, #sexist, #ableist and otherwise #discriminatory demands because doing so violates national and #EU #laws!

#NotLegalAdvice #USpol #DEI

Jorge Glas is an Ecuadoran electrical engineer who served as vice president in the Correa administration. He stayed in office briefly under Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, but he was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes in the Odebrecht scandal. He served years in prison and was later sentenced to many more years in prison. While on a kind of parole, he took refuge in the Mexican embassy in Quito in December 2023, claiming he was a victim of political persecution. Last month, the Ecuadoran government raided the embassy and arrested Glas, prompting diplomatic protests from around the world and a dispute between Mexico and Ecuador at the ICJ. (You can read about the proceedings here).

The incident ties together a couple of old strands of Letters Blogatory posts. First is the Julian Assange diplomatic asylum case. The case was full of irony back in 2012, since Assange, a self-proclaimed champion of free speech rights, was seeking asylum from a government that had been persecuting its domestic press. The case also had a fair share of crazy: the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued an opinion in 2016 arguing that Assange, who had skipped bail in the UK, where he was at risk of extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and sexual molestation, was somehow being arbitrarily detained in the embassy where he was hiding out. There’s irony today, too, in Ecuador of all countries raiding an embassy to make an arrest, both because of its stance in the Assange case and because Mexico and Ecuador (along with several other Latin American states) are both parties to the Convention on Diplomatic Asylum, while the UK, with most of the world, does not really recognize a right to diplomatic asylum.

Second is Ecuador’s PR campaign at the height of the Donziger case in the US. In 2014, the government invited me and others to Ecuador to visit polluted sites in the Amazon and to attend a conference presenting the government’s side of the case. That trip led to one of my favorite series of Letters Blogatory posts: a post on the conference itself, and a post about what I saw in the Amazon. During the conference, we visited the Carondelet Palace for a ninety-minute meeting with the vice president, Jorge Glas.

The key legal question is the inviolability of diplomatic missions under the Vienna Convention. There are some difficult questions about what inviolability means. Does it prevent the host state from regulating the terms and conditions of employment of its nationals on embassy premises? And so forth. But sending the police to arrest someone inside an embassy does not seem like a close call, even if the embassy did not have the right to grant the person asylum (which in this case raises questions under the Latin American treaty on asylum I mentioned above). We will see how the ICJ comes out on these question, but I am comfortable hazarding a guess in this case that Mexico will prevail on the main question.

I have no knowledge of the facts of the case against Glas, and so I don’t know whether or not he took bribes or whether or not he is a victim of political persecution. I will say that I remember him as a typical engineer, maybe even an “egghead,” very knowledgable about the technical details of oil extraction and much less charismatic and overtly political than President Correa, whose 2014 speech at the Kennedy School I covered just before my visit. Just on a personal level, I wish him well.

Photo Credit: Agencia de Noticias ANDES (CC BY-SA)

https://lettersblogatory.com/2024/05/05/the-jorge-glas-affair/

#asylum #Ecuador #Mexico #ViennaConvention