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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.
There's no such thing as an interpol agent. They delegate to national agencies (ie the DoJ) who do /not/ get immunity. What they do have is a bunch of committees and advisors, and a (shared) database of people 'of interest'.
Somebody's been watching the man from UNCLE a few too many times
And this is why you should not pretend to be a lawyer. Ready?
Interpol has no police force. It conducts no investigations. It doesn't arrest anyone. As an international organization it was not subject to FOIA requests anyway, because it's not a department of the federal government.
As a previous poster noted, this is NOT DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY. This is immunity from attachment of any property that Interpol may have in the USA. Any employees of Interpol, if any, stationed in the USA can and would still be arrested for crimes they commit. In summary, both the original submitter and basically every comment I've seen so far are not just wrong, they are comically wrong.
Technically they were already immune? That's a rather important technicality ... because you explicitly blamed Obama for giving them immunity from prosecution. In actuality 12425 is the executive order which gave them that ... the one with Ronald Reagan's signature below it.
Because the Slashdot editors mangled my entry. There was no link to the ABC News article in what I submitted, but I did have a link to the story on unpaid UN parking tickets.
Ah, so a slashdot editor actually managed to improve a submission by linking to accurate information? I'm honestly shocked.
What really irks me is that this actually is a granting of full diplomatic immunity. If you go through the list of all the possible options for diplomatic immunity (it comes in different kinds), INTERPOL now has them all. So, yeah, I called it full diplomatic immunity.
No, it isn't, as your own links state.
Either you don't understand the difference between "immune to prosecution" and "immune to prosecution for official acts", or you don't understand what INTERPOL's official business is in the U.S. Or you somehow think "immunity for some actions" is the same as "full" immunity.
FULL diplomatic immunity means free from prosecution for any and all acts.
Let me spell it out for you.
If I was the French Ambassador to the U.S., and I was caught in L.A. snorting cocaine from from the ass crack of a dead 12 year old boy who I'd just raped and killed (not necessarily in that order), then the worst that the U.S. or local governments could do to to me would be to kick me out of the country -- unless of course France revoked my immunity, which you can certainly imagine happening in this case, but you get my point.
Now if I were an employee of INTERPOL, I would be prosecutable under U.S. and local law. As in NOT full immunity.
Unless you can explain how rape, murder, and drug use are official actions,
And you know what INTERPOL's official business is in the U.S.? Handing information provided by other nations' police forces over to U.S. police forces. That's it. That doesn't cover a very wide variety of actions, thus doesn't provide immunity for a very wide variety of actions, and thus only someone either completely foolish or deliberately stirring shit would call that "full immunity".
If you weren't wrong, I'd agree with you.
If you were any judge of right and wrong, you wouldn't have written such a shitty summary to begin with.
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