By
 |
|
A New York City traffic warden issues a
ticket. The diplomatic community owes an incredible $16million in unpaid fines
|
Less than a week after the October
terror attack on Parliament Hill, as many as nine police cars converged on a
black SUV veering erratically down a major Ottawa thoroughfare.
Pulling the vehicle over, the officers
confirmed the suspicions of 911 callers: The man behind the wheel was indeed
visibly intoxicated. If the driver were a Canadian citizen,
his licence would be given a three-month immediate suspension and his car
impounded for a week. If convicted, he would face a $1,000 fine and a one-year
driving suspension.
But the 32-year-old driver flashed a
badge: He was a Saudi Arabian diplomat with full diplomatic immunity. The
police drove him to the embassy, towed his car and made a phone call to the
Department of Foreign Affairs. (The Department did not respond to National
Post requests over whether the diplomat faced any additional consequences.)
There are quirks to any capital city:
Motorcades, recession-proof employment, an unusually vibrant singles scene. But
the strangest side of Ottawa — and among its least visible — is the fact that
it has as many as 6,000 residents who are effectively above the law. As a city
filled with secretaries, drivers, nannies and teenagers who can technically
break the rules with abandon, Ottawa is actually surprisingly well-behaved.
“You can issue them a ticket, but they
wouldn’t have to pay it,” said Marc Soucy, spokesman for the Ottawa Police.
And it’s not just speeding tickets. In
just the last five years, diplomats have shoplifted, skipped rent, allegedly
brandished knives in street fights and led high-speed chases that ended with
them plowing into police cars.
Every once in a while, a diplomat is
even caught with a slave. Last year, the nanny of Philippine diplomatic couple
Bueneflor Cruz, 44, and Robert Cruz, 45, approached an Ottawa lawyer saying
that the Cruzes had taken her to Canada, stripped her of identifying
documentation and forced her to work 14-hour days.
In May, Ottawa Police requested that
the Philippine Embassy waive the Cruzes’ diplomatic immunity so that they could
face Canadian human trafficking charges — but by then the couple had
already left the country.
“We’ve seen it in the past, but it
hasn’t been brought to the police, the domestic worker is just rescued and
official charges are never made because of fear for their lives,” said Aimée
Beboso, chair of the Ottawa-based Philippine Migrant Society of Canada.
In the last 10 years, their group has
dealt with three or four instances of a domestic worker seeking to escape
slave-like conditions from a diplomatic residence: “Unpaid hours, confiscation
of official documents … not allowing them to leave the premises without
escort,” said Ms. Beboso.
The Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa
similarly encounters about five instances per year in which diplomatic status
complicates a child welfare investigation.
In one 2012 occurrence, the society
called police about a possible sex assault on a minor perpetrated by the son of
a diplomatic agent — although charges were not pursued due to a “lack of
cooperation” by the complainant.
The singular incident that overhangs
all instance of Canadian diplomatic misbehaviour occurred in 2001, when a
severely intoxicated Russian diplomat ploughed his car onto an Ottawa sidewalk,
killing lawyer Catherine MacLean.
So drunk he could barely walk, the
diplomat invoked his diplomatic immunity at the scene, and was soon back home
in Russia — although he would later serve four years in a Russian penal colony.
“The one law I always made sure to
underline [with new diplomats] is our drinking and driving policy because of
what happened here,” said Robert Collette, Canada’s chief of protocol from 2003
to 2005.
Mr. Collette is quick to note that
diplomats are mostly quiet. Their rates of impaired driving are generally lower
than that of non-diplomatic Ottawans, and they contribute an estimated
$10-million into the local economy each year.
Plus, after decades of letting the
British do it for us, it’s always nice to see Canada having direct
relations with foreign countries.
Diplomatic immunity is laid out in the
Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and is based on the ancient principle
that envoys should be free to negotiate peace deals without getting killed or
kidnapped by their foreign hosts.
And the privilege goes both ways.
Canada, for instance, can open embassies in some of the more fundamentalist
corners of the Middle East without fearing that its staff will be prosecuted
for accidentally blaspheming or exposing their hair.
Diplomatic privilege, of course,
extends far beyond mere immunity from criminal prosecution.
As foreign representatives, Ottawa’s
diplomats are not subject to federal tax, which means they can buy liquor at
50% off and request special tax-free bills at Ottawa restaurants. Diplomats are
also entitled to purchase duty-free cars, a measure that can drop the sticker
price as much as 20%.
Carmakers like Volvo and BMW know this,
and market aggressively to Ottawa’s diplomatic community. Often, it makes
financial sense for a diplomat to purchase a car tax-free in Canada and then
ship it home at the end of their posting.
Compared to, say, Damascus or
Bratislava, Ottawa is generally considered a plum posting for the world’s
ambassadorial staff, and the comfort of the Canadian capital does wonders to
keep diplomats on their best behaviour.
“The embassies that I tend to work with
are foreign missions that want to respect the laws of the host country, and
that’s why they use me, because they don’t know what the laws are here,” said
Ruba El-Sayegh, an Ottawa lawyer specializing in diplomatic law.
Ottawa’s real estate community, for
one, has no problem taking on diplomatic tenants — although they incur quite a
bit of added risk when they do so.
Not only do their properties
effectively become converted into foreign soil as soon as they ink a lease
agreement with an embassy, but diplomatic immunity makes it particularly tricky
to evict troublesome tenants, or chase them for rent arrears.
“I have had to serve notices for late
payment of rent or damage to the property on diplomatic tenants,” an Ottawa
property manager told the National Post. “Nobody ever tried to invoke
diplomatic privilege.”
However, Mr. Collette said instances of
diplomatic tenants shirking their rent “has happened.”
“We cannot enforce these things,
obviously, but we can try to apply pressure,” he said.
In those cases, a simple case of
uncollected rent can become a minor diplomatic spat as Canada approaches the
responsible embassy — and even the home country — to politely ask for the bill
to be paid.
“We have been lucky, everything went
well in that regard during the time that I was there,” he said.
Asking nicely has similarly proved to
be an effective option whenever the rebellious teenager of a diplomat goes on
an immunity-fueled petty crime spree.
“In my time, there may have been one
adolescent who was difficult, and we had to ask the ambassador to come in so we
could have a discussion about it,” said Mr. Collette, adding that the
ambassador “took it upon himself” to ensure that the child was quickly set
straight.
Parking, too, is surprisingly well
ordered. In Washington, D.C., and around the United Nations headquarters in New
York City, the streets are famously plagued with scofflaw diplomatic vehicles.
As per a 2010 estimate, the City of New
York was owed $18-million in unpaid parking tickets by foreign diplomats, with
Egypt, Kuwait and Nigeria topping the list.
Meter attendants are a bit more
hard-nosed in Canada’s capital, however. Since the 1990s, the Province of
Ontario has pursued a policy of cancelling the diplomatic plates of scofflaws.
According to some estimates, this has resulted in 80% of Ottawa diplomatic
parking tickets being paid.
But, in a city that still remembers the
death of Catherine MacLean, residents know full well that prosecuting the
behavior of a law-breaking foreign diplomat can only go so far.
Only months after Ms. MacLean’s death,
a drunk Japanese diplomat sped through a red light, narrowly missed a van full
of teenagers and then smashed into a traffic light.
Canada asked to prosecute him, publish
his name and then have him kicked out of the country. Instead, he had his keys
taken away for a year.
National Post, with files from
Postmedia News
Source: http://news.nationalpost.com
No comments:
Post a Comment