On Sat, 23 Jun 2001, s346223 wrote:
> G'day,
>
> in the last few nights there have been a few interesting articles on the
> news about the US govt investigation of the Khobar bombing in the Saudi
> kingdom. Aside from the geopolitical issues at play in this issue, what
> was very interesting was the US claim to global legal jurisdiction (as it
> seemed in the articles). It reminded me quite strongly of the
> extra-judiciality [sorry if my memory has scrambled this word] by treaty
> of Westerners and Japanese in 19th c. China.
>
> Mind you, i have only had limited access to the net and news in the last
> few days, so i may have misunderstood it. Is there, essentially, a claim
> to global jurisdiction?
>
> cheers
>
> Ibrahim Underwood
I couldn't find anything to snip, so I'm leaving it as is. The word
you're looking for is extra-territoriality, first. This issue is very
different from _that_, but it is (sort of) a claim to global jurisdiction
under very limited circumstances. Extra-territoriality was something
imposed by European powers on China during the 19th century. Under it,
European citizens who were in China were governed by European, not
Chinese, law. That is quite different from this situation. The United
States makes no claim, for example, that American citizens living and
working in Saudi Arabia are immune from Saudi law and subject only to
American courts.
It is, however, a claim to global jurisdiction in a very limited sense.
Although American law is domestically very sensitive to jurisdictional
claims, it is considerably less so in the international arena. In this
case, the bombing of the Khobar towers is covered under Federal
anti-terrorism statues that make it a crime under Federal law to attack
United States citizens in circumstances under the fairly loose rubric of
"terrorist" acts. This is obviously not a claim invoked under most
circumstances - when my family was robbed on a train taking us from Italy
to Switzerland, the American government obviously had no effect on the
situation. But under the special and egregious circumstances of a
terrorist act against American citizens, American law does claim the right
to prosecute. Although the major _reason_ for passing this law was
basically grandstanding by the Congress, there are two major reasons that
I find the law justifiable. The first is that many acts of terrorism take
place in locations where justice is an unlikely outcome of the judicial
process. The bombing of Marines in Beirut, for example, was unlikely to
be effectively prosecuted by the Lebanese authorities at the time. The
second is that most prosecutions of terrorists involve the use of
intelligence information that cannot, for obvious reasons, be released to
a foreign government. Under those circumstances, the United States
government has chosen to claim that it has jurisdiction over terrorist
attacks on american citizens abroad. Note that this is partial, not sole
jurisdiction - American law does not deny local authorities the right to
prosecute, and American police agencies regularly assist them in doing so.
Many countries have, in fact, granted the United states such jurisdiction
in a wide variety of circumstances. The embassy bombings in Kenya, for
example, were, I believe prosecuted under American law with the consent
and cooperation of the Kenyan government. No foreign national has ever
been attacked by a terrorist group on American soil, so far as I am aware,
so the reverse of whether the American government would grant jurisdiction
to another country has never been tested. In fact, I believe that the
World Trade Center bombing was the first (and, God willing, only) incident
of an attack by foreign terrorists within the United States.
Gautam Mukunda
