IT MAY only have been formalised at global level in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, signed by 186 states, but the idea of diplomatic immunity has been a cornerstone of relations between peoples since time immemorial. As Harold Nicolson wrote in his history of diplomacy: “It must soon have been realised that no negotiation could reach a satisfactory conclusion if the emissaries of either party were murdered on arrival. Thus the first principle to become firmly established was that of diplomatic immunity.”
Genghis Khan took the principle so seriously he was wont to raze cities for killing his ambassadors. The Mongols destroyed the Khwarezmid empire after theirs had been mistreated. And with the protection of diplomats, logic demands the protection of embassies as sovereign territory.
And so the decision by Ecuador yesterday to stand up to British bullying and to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange political asylum is to be applauded. And it should be strongly diplomatically supported by the Government, whatever the merits of Assange’s own case. Once London’s threat had been made to revoke under a 1987 law the Ecuadorean embassy’s diplomatic status on the dubious grounds that it had ceased “to use land for the purposes of its mission or exclusively for the purposes of a consular post”, Quito had no political choice.
It had to stand by Assange, who may now face the prospect of living in the embassy for many years as the British, insisting on their obligation to extradite him to Sweden to face questioning over alleged rapes, are most unlikely to grant him safe passage to Ecuador. It would not be unknown – in 1978 two Pentecostal families from Chernogorsk in Siberia burst into the US Moscow embassy seeking help to leave the country. They would be there in the embassy under US protection for five years. Such protection, like that extended by the US recently in Beijing to blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, is an important dimension of the diplomacy of democratic countries. It is being jeopardised by the dangerous British assertion that it can unilaterally define what constitutes diplomatic activity.
It is arguable, as Assange does, not altogether convincingly, that he is a political prisoner facing politically motivated extradition charges, that these may eventually land him in a US court facing a death penalty prohibited in EU law, that the treatment by the US of Bradley Manning, allegedly his source, is evidence of the US system’s inherent brutality ... But, right or wrong, deciding to heed that argument is a matter for Ecuador.