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INTERPOL Granted Diplomatic Immunity In the US
ShakaUVM writes "A couple of weeks ago without any fanfare or notice in the media, President Obama granted INTERPOL full diplomatic immunity while conducting investigations on American soil. While INTERPOL has been allowed to operate in the US in the past, under an executive order by President Reagan, they've had to follow the same rules as the FBI, CIA, etc., while on American soil. This means, among other things, the new executive order makes INTERPOL immune to Freedom of Information Act requests and that INTERPOL agents cannot be punished for most any crimes they may commit. Hopefully the worst we'll see from this is INTERPOL agents ignoring their speeding tickets." Update: 01/05 02:57 GMT by KD : Reader davecb pointed out an ABC News blog that comes to pretty much the opposite conclusion as to the import of the executive order.
the headline says:
INTERPOL Granted Diplomatic Immunity In the US
The actual article says: "these privileges are not the same as the rights afforded under "diplomatic immunity," they are considerably less. "Diplomatic immunity" comes from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which states that a "diplomatic agent shall enjoy immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the receiving State." That is NOT what the International Organizations Immunities Act is.
The headline seems to be wrong.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Come on, you're telling me that INTERPOL now has the same protection as the "International Pacific Halibut Commission and Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission".
Yeapsireee, gotta watch out for those rouge Halbut operatives. Goodness me.
More seriously, remember INTERPOL actually has very little power - they're a coordination agency. They have no powers of arrest. They don't even DO investigations. What they DO is if a cop in Australia is tracking down a criminal who's fled to Los Angeles and therefore needs the LAPD assistance, INTERPOL is the agency that makes that inter-police-force connection happen. There are no "INTERPOL" officers in L.A. that do the arrest - that's for the LAPD (or FBI).
These are the additional privileges granted to Interpol:
Section 2(c), which provided officials immunity from their property and assets being searched and confiscated; including their archives;
the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes;
Section 4, dealing with federal taxes;
Section 5, dealing with Social Security; and
Section 6, dealing with property taxes.
That's it. How exactly does that make you less sovereign?
This summary is flat out WRONG. It's phrased to start a flamewar. Click the news link, and see what it says. He did not grant full diplomatic immunity to INTERPOL. I quote from the article: "Basically, recognizing a group under the International Organizations Immunities Act means officials from those organizations are exempt from some taxes and customs fees, and that their records cannot be seized." FOIA might be affected, but they are not immune to crimes.
That sure sounds pretty cut and dried to me.
It doesn't give them universal immunity to do as they will within our borders. Interpol has no police force. It's just an administrative organization that basically acts as a go-between between countries.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/interpol.asp
No, I was correct, and you're the moron.
No, they're not. You may have been thinking of Europol, or you may be lost in your own delusional fantasy. Either way, you're wrong. Interpol has a staff of around 600 people, and a budget of $60 million; the FBI has 32,700+ employees, and a $7 billion budget.
This is, in fact, correct. They are national law enforcement police who are subject to national laws. An FBI agent on loan to Interpol's office in New York receives no immunities or privileges he didn't have as an FBI agent. Obama's order is regarding the organization itself, the Interpol General Secretariat.
From the Wikipedia page on Interpol:
Read that closely: When two police agencies need to co-operate across borders, they go through Interpol. Interpol doesn't investigate and arrest them; national law enforcement does, with Interpol acting as the co-ordinating agency. They don't originate investigations, and they don't make arrests on their own authority--that's the whole point of each country setting up an NCB staffed by locals with the authority to be police officers.
And to be perfectly clear, a national law enforcement officer in the NCB receives no benefit from the order Obama signed, which doesn't confer diplomatic immunity anyway--it's a lesser form of organizational immunity granted to international organizations that applies to Interpol's records and bureaucratic operations, not to their personnel.
Got that? Interpol doesn't have diplomatic immunity, they have International Organizations Immunity:
In other words, if someone from the general secretariat works in the NY office, they don't have to pay NY taxes and their paperwork can't be searched. If they jerk off on the subway, they can still be arrested for indecent exposure.
Thanks for playing, though.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you read the supplied Snopes link, it will tell you that the local governments have the right to decide upon the legality of warrants passed on by Interpol, meaning they are allowed only as much latitude as the states deign to grant. The local governments decide on the legality, the local governments send law enforcement if needed, etc. Interpol does not of those things. Interpol doesn't even issue warrants, it requires one of the member countries to do so. They simply pass them on to the necessary recipient.
Interpol does NOT have a police force, it does not conduct criminal investigations, and it does not make arrests. It acts as a data manager of sorts, for any member nations, coordinating information, passing warrants as needed from one member country to another, etc. They are basically an administration/secretarial service on an international scale. Whatever odd idea of Interpol people may have gotten from the Bond flicks or whatnot, are not quite accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol
For those that don't want to read through all of the Snopes/NYTimes information:
These are the same standard rights that are granted to some 70+ other international organizations. These additional rights were not granted to Interpol because it did not have a local office on US soil at the time. This was submitted prior to Bush leaving office and the State Department suggested approving it so that Interpol had the same legal status as other international organizations. It was not completed before Bush left office however. This is a bit of house cleaning to complete the request.