Harry Dunn: Anne Sacoolas immunity “a palpable absurdity”

Did Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US intelligence officer in Britain, have diplomatic immunity when she allegedly killed Harry Dunn in a highway accident in Northamptonshire last August?

Harry’s dad and mom insist that she failed to, and that she can be tried for causing his loss of life.

The Foreign Business office and the US embassy in London argue that she did.

Now a single of Britain’s top rated authorities on diplomacy has poured scorn on the British and American argument.

The Dunns’ attorneys, headed by Geoffrey Robertson QC, requested Sir Ivor Roberts, a previous British ambassador in Serbia, Ireland and Italy, for his feeling. Right after retiring from the diplomatic support Sir Ivor was head of Trinity Higher education, Oxford.

His report on the arguments produced by the British and US governments, which I have go through, is remarkably strongly worded.

Mrs Sacoolas’s husband was an American intelligence officer based mostly at RAF Croughton. That gave him a specific level of diplomatic immunity. The British and US governments manage that this meant that, as his wife, Mrs Sacoolas had immunity as well.

Sir Ivor says this is “a palpable absurdity”.

He quotations a letter of arrangement among the International Office environment and the US ambassador to Britain in August 1995 about the American staff at RAF Croughton. This suggests explicitly that diplomatic immunity for people like Mr Sacoolas would not use for “functions executed outdoors the training course of their duties”.

If Mr Sacoolas was not coated for functions outside the house his duties, Sir Ivor says, it would be absurd for Mrs Sacoolas, who had no formal place, to be immune from prosecution when her husband was not.

He will not mince his text. “It was obviously not expected that this settlement may be dishonourably challenged by the US federal government by their embassy in London,” he states.

In Sir Ivor’s see both the British and US sides realized that again in 1995 they had agreed that “both equally brokers and their dependents” had been issue to British prison legislation in their non-work functions at RAF Croughton.

For the People to argue the reverse would, he said, be regarded by professional diplomats as a breach of fantastic religion.

Text and expressions like “palpable absurdity”, “dishonourably” and “breach of very good religion” are rare from a leading specialist on diplomacy.

Although the judges at the Significant Court agreed that Sir Ivor was a top figure in the research of diplomacy, they did not accept his report on the complex grounds that he was not a practising law firm.

They rejected an software by the Dunns to drive the International Place of work to disclose proof relating to a “mystery arrangement” among the US and British governments.

But this was a preliminary hearing, and it would seem fair to believe that Sir Ivor’s scathing impression of the case offered by the International Office and the US embassy will have an influence on the situation as it continues.