User blogs

Recent official revelations about the ‘special arrangements’ governing the diplomatic status of the US intelligence hub at the Croughton airbase in the English Midlands, which were provoked by the Sacoolas affair, raise important questions.

Article 12* of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961 (VCDR), reads as follows:

First it was the Foreign Office (FO), then it evolved into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and today it becomes – as foreshadowed by Boris Johnson on 16 June – Britain’s ‘super-department for international affairs’, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Was this a good idea?

An influential article of 2014 noted that health attachés were appointed shortly after the Second World War and were thereafter assigned by 'a growing number of countries [...] to work in embassies in countries of strategic importance'. Is this true? If not, why not? And does it matter anyway?

The term soft power (and its siblings hard power and smart power), employed to embrace a particular category of resources of potential power, originated in the stable of Joseph S Nye, Jr, a Harvard University distinguished service professor and former senior member of the US military-intelligence complex.

I am a keen gardener, and during the Covid-19 lockdown I had the great good fortune to be allowed by our neighbour, Janet, to take over the care of her very large, tree-lined, and blissfully quiet garden. The weather was also unusually good, so I spent on average six hours a day working in it through late March, April, and May. I could have wished for nothing more.

Answer: The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. Why?

On 2 July 2020 I received an e-mail from Razvan Constantinescu, the energetic Romanian honorary-consul general for the south-west of England based in Bristol and president of the Bristol Consular Corps. This told me how the COVID-19 pandemic first revolutionised the nature of his workload, and then reduced it to a ‘walk in the park’.

When the abuse of diplomatic immunity is alleged to have occurred, it usually refers to diplomatic officers taking advantage of their special status under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) to avoid penalties for misdemeanours, such as ignoring parking regulations, shoplifting, and so on; occasionally for more serious offences.

The future relationship negotiations between Britain and the EU, which commenced on 3 March 2020, teach many lessons in the art of negotiation. Among these are the obvious value of certain kinds of deadline and the less obvious value of publicly announcing ‘red lines’ before talks start. For present purposes I shall concentrate on what they reveal about videoconferencing and whether it has all been for show.

The US Department of State has announced its conclusion that requiring Anne Sacoolas to return to the UK to face a criminal charge would set a precedent that would weaken diplomatic law. However, a closer look at diplomatic law reveals that this claim does not hold up.