OPINION:
A girl police say stabbed a boy at her D.C. school is going to escape criminal charges — at least for the time being — because she is the daughter of a diplomat and therefore, seen as exempt from normal U.S. laws.
This is a stunning example of why diplomatic immunity needs speedy reform.
This girl, unnamed but age 12, allegedly stabbed a 13-year-old boy in the shoulder at the British International School of Washington in Georgetown. Anyone else caught even carrying a knife, never mind carrying out a stabbing, would have been at the least, suspended — more likely, expelled.
Zero tolerance, anyone?
Heck, half the schools in America don’t even let students use a plastic knife in lunch room cafeterias. And this girl was able to wield a metal one?
“The suspect has been identified,” said Metropolitan Police Department Inspector Mike Coligan, NBC reported. “However, because of her diplomatic status, there’s going to be no arrest at this time.”
Police will be checking with the State Department and attorney general to determine if criminal charges will eventually come. If so, the girl could face prosecution — again, eventually.
That’s nice. Meanwhile, the boy’s recovering at Children’s National Medical Center — and the rest of America are left collectively scratching heads, wondering why those of other nations get to thumb their noses at laws the citizens themselves have to abide.
In July 2011, Fox News ran a story with this headline: “Report: Children of Foreign Diplomats Enjoy U.S. ’Super Citizen’ Status” — as if there were such a thing.
Founding Fathers, after all, didn’t create a system of governance that was This for one set of people, That for another. Remember the concept of justice is blind?
Well, forget it. For diplomats — and their family members — that’s a principle that need not apply.
In September 2015, Breitbart went with this headline: “Qatari Beverly Hills Drag Racer Claims Diplomatic Immunity, Yells ’F***’America,’” a story about a couple of high-ranking royals who found fit to race their Ferrari and Porsche down residential Beverly Hills streets, pedestrians and other drivers be danged.
As one small child, age 10, told KTLA5 about the speeding cars: “I was scared to go home, like any second an 80 mile-per-hour zooming car can come and hit all of us.”
One of the drivers was identified as a Qatar prince who claimed diplomatic immunity from prosecution, before fleeing the country.
There’s more.
The Guardian blasted this headline in a September 2016 about how diplomats living from Canberra, Australia, to New York City dodge local law: “A fine mess: how diplomats get away without paying parking tickets.”
The amounts are sizable. The bill, at the time, for U.N. diplomats who hadn’t yet paid their parking tickets in New York City stood at $16 million.
Could we please reel in the exemptions and special accommodations — read: special laws — granted diplomats and their chosen travel mates?
The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations states diplomats and “members of the diplomatic staff, and of the administrative and technical staff and of the service staff of the mission” are granted “immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the receiving state,” and similar immunity from civil proceedings.
That’s a lot of fancy rhetoric that apparently, is now interpreted to mean this: Diplomats’ daughters ought not stab boys in school — but if they do, they won’t be prosecuted.
This is an outrage to law-abiding Americans, to the Constitution and to good old-fashioned common sense and virtue.
Fact is, America is governed by law, and those laws are supposed to hold true for all. Neither diplomats nor their spoiled, entitled children should be allowed to get away with criminal or illegal behaviors — and that goes for parking, for stabbing, and for everything in between.
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