This advanced law seminar examines diplomatic immunity through the structural tension between civil jurisdiction and criminal jurisdiction. While diplomatic immunity is often treated as a single doctrine, its operation diverges sharply across civil and criminal proceedings. This course explores how international law constructs these distinctions, how domestic courts interpret them, and how political realities shape enforcement.
Students engage deeply with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, customary international law, domestic implementing statutes, and comparative jurisprudence. Through case-driven analysis, the course investigates why criminal immunity is nearly absolute, why civil immunity contains narrow exceptions, and how both systems struggle with accountability when serious misconduct occurs.
The seminar examines real disputes involving violent crimes, tort claims, employment litigation, human rights abuses, commercial disputes, and wrongful death. It also evaluates waiver, persona non grata practice, compensation settlements, and diplomatic negotiation as substitutes for adjudication. The course emphasizes doctrinal interpretation, normative critique, and institutional limits of international legal enforcement.
This course assumes prior study of public international law.
Course Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
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Distinguish doctrinal foundations of civil and criminal immunity.
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Interpret Articles 29–39 of the Vienna Convention with precision.
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Analyze comparative court decisions involving diplomats.
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Evaluate accountability gaps created by immunity.
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Assess the role of waiver, recall, and diplomatic negotiation.
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Understand jurisdictional conflicts between host and sending states.
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Critically examine human rights challenges to immunity.
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Compare civil remedies with criminal enforcement limitations.
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Evaluate reform proposals and normative critiques.
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Apply immunity doctrines to complex factual scenarios.
