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exterritoriality |
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Sometimes spelled ‘extraterritoriality’, the fiction that in law the diplomatic agent abroad remains at home, and certainly outside of the territory of the state to which he or she is accredited. The term itself probably originated with an observation of Grotius in his De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625). Now a quality most commonly associated with diplomatic premises and still sometimes believed or at least pretended, not least by professional diplomats, to be an important explanation of diplomatic privileges and immunities, exterritoriality is in fact no more than a very loose description of them. As Vattel wrote in Le Droit des Gens in 1758, ‘this is only a figurative way of expressing his [the ambassador\'s] independence of the jurisdiction of the country and his possession of all the rights necessary to the due success of the embassy’. Lawyers have attached little importance to exterritoriality since at least the nineteenth century and it is nowhere mentioned in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961). Nevertheless, it remains, as has been said, a ‘striking image’ and thus a useful political buttress to diplomatic immunity. See also functional approach. |
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