[News] The Premises of the Diplomatic Mission Shall Be Inviolable

Thu Apr 11 08:32:21 EDT 2024

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*The Premises of the Diplomatic Mission Shall Be Inviolable: The 
Fifteenth Newsletter (2024)*

Afshin Pirhashemi (Iran), /Untitled/, 2017.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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We live in dishonest times, where certainties have crumbled, and 
malevolence stalks the landscape. There is Gaza, of course. Gaza above 
all else is on our minds. Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed 
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by Israel since 7 October, with more than 7,000 people missing (5,000 of 
them children). The Israeli government has brutally disregarded the 
global public opinion mounted against them. Billions of people are 
outraged by the stark fact of their violence and yet we are unable to 
force a ceasefire from an army that has decided to raze an entire 
people. Global North governments speak from two sides of their mouths: 
clichéd phrases of concern to ameliorate their own disheartened 
populations, and then vetoes at the United Nations and arms transfers to 
the Israeli army. It is this two-faced behaviour that bolsters the 
confidence of people like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 
enables their impunity.

That same impunity allowed Israel to violate the UN Charter (1945) and 
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 
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(1961) on 1 April 2024 when it bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, 
Syria, killing sixteen people – including senior Iranian military 
officers. This impunity is infectious, spreading amongst leaders who 
feel emboldened by Washington’s arrogance. Among them is Ecuador’s 
President Daniel Noboa, who sent his paramilitary forces into the 
Mexican embassy in Quito on 5 April to seize the country’s former Vice 
President Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by the 
Mexican authorities. Noboa’s government, like Netanyahu’s, set aside the 
long history of international respect for diplomatic relations with 
scant regard for the dangerous implications of this kind of action. 
There is a feeling amongst leaders such as Netanyahu and Noboa that they 
can get away with anything because they are protected by the Global 
North, which anyway gets away with everything.

Lucía Chiriboga (Ecuador), /Untitled/ from the series ‘Del fondo de la 
memoria, vengo’ (‘I Come from the Depths of Memory’), 1993.

Diplomatic customs go back hundreds of thousands of years and across 
cultures and continents. Ancient texts written by Zhuang Zhou in China 
and his contemporary in India, Kautilya, in the fourth century BCE set 
the terms for honourable relationships between states through their 
emissaries. These terms appear in almost every region of the world, with 
evidence of conflicts resulting in agreements that include the exchange 
of envoys to maintain peace. These ideas from the ancient world, 
including Roman law, influenced the early European writers of customary 
international law: Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Cornelis van Bijnkershoek 
(1673–1743), and Emer de Vattel (1714–1767). It was this global 
understanding of the necessity of diplomatic courtesy that formed the 
idea of diplomatic immunity.

In 1952, the government of Yugoslavia proposed that the International 
Law Commission (ILC), set up by the UN, codify diplomatic relations. To 
assist the ILC, the UN appointed Emil Sandström, a Swedish lawyer who 
had chaired the UN Special Committee on Palestine (1947), as special 
rapporteur. The ILC, with Sandström’s assistance, drafted articles on 
diplomatic relations, which were studied and amended by the 81 member 
states of the UN. At a month-long meeting in Vienna in 1961, all the 
member states participated in the Convention on Diplomatic Relations. 
Amongst the 61 states that became signatories were Ecuador and Israel, 
as well as the United States. All three countries are, therefore, among 
the founding states of the 1961 Vienna Convention.

Article 22.1 of the Vienna Convention says: ‘The premises of the mission 
shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter 
them, except with the consent of the head of the mission’.

Safwan Dahoul (Syria), /Dream 77/, 2014.

At a briefing 
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in the UN Security Council about Israel’s recent strike on the Iranian 
embassy in Syria, Deputy Ambassador Geng Shuang of China reminded his 
colleagues that 25 years ago, the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia 
resulted in an attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. At the time, 
US President Bill Clinton apologised 
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for the attack, calling it an ‘isolated, tragic event’. No such apology 
has come from Israel or Ecuador for their violations of the Iranian and 
Mexican embassies. Geng Shuang told the chamber, ‘The red line of 
international law and the basic norms of international relations have 
been breached time and again. And the moral bottom line of human 
conscience has also been crushed time and again’. At that briefing, 
Ecuador’s Ambassador José De la Gasca condemned the attack on the 
Iranian embassy in Damascus. ‘Nothing justifies these types of attacks’, 
he said. A few days later, his government violated the 1961 Vienna 
Convention and the 1954 Organisation of American States’ Convention on 
Diplomatic Asylum 
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when it arrested Jorge Glas in the Mexican embassy, an act that was 
swiftly condemned 
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by the UN secretary-general.

Such violations of embassy protections are not new. There are many 
examples of radical groups – from the left and the right – attacking 
embassies to make a political point. This includes the 1979 takeover of 
the US embassy in Tehran, when students held 53 staff hostage for 444 
days. But there are also several examples of governments forcibly 
entering the premises of foreign embassies, such as in 1985 when the 
South African apartheid regime sent its forces to the Dutch embassy to 
arrest 
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a Dutch national who had assisted the African National Congress and in 
1989 when the invading US army searched 
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the residence of the Nicaraguan ambassador in Panama City. None of these 
interventions went by without sanction and a demand for an apology. 
Neither Israel nor Ecuador, however – both signatories of the 1961 
Vienna Convention – have made any gesture towards an apology. Neither 
Iran nor Syria had any diplomatic relations with Israel, and Mexico 
broke diplomatic ties with Ecuador in the wake of recent events.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexico), /Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México 
/(‘Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert, Mexico’), 1979.

Violence traverses the world like a new pandemic not only in Gaza, but 
spreading outward to this brewing conflict around Ecuador and the 
ugliness of the wars in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, 
Sudan, and the continuing stalemate in Ukraine. War breaks the human 
spirit, but it also invokes an enormous instinct to go the streets and 
stop the trigger from being pulled. Again and again, this great anti-war 
feeling is met with the wrath of powers that arrest the peacemakers and 
treat them – and not the merchants of death – as the criminals.

Parviz Tanavoli (Iran), /Last Poet of Iran/, 1968.

Iran has a glorious tradition of poetry that goes back to Abu Abdallah 
Rudaki (858–941) and then shines in the /Diwan/ of Khwaja Shams al-Din 
Muhammad Hafiz Shirazi (1320–1390), who gave us this bitter thought: /in 
the world of dust, no human being shines; it is necessary to build 
another world, to make a new Adam/.

In this tradition of Farsi poetry comes Garous Abdolmalekian (b. 1980), 
whose poems are saturated with war and its impact. But, even amidst the 
bullets and the tanks sits the powerful desire for peace and love, as in 
his ‘Poem for Stillness’ (2020):

    He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
    He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
    He scratches his thoughts with a gun barrel

    And sometimes
    he sits facing himself
    and pulls bullet-memories
    out of his brain

    He’s fought in many wars
    but is no match for his own despair

    These white pills
    have left him so colourless
    his shadow must stand up
    to fetch him water

    We ought to accept
    that no soldier
    has ever returned
    from war
    alive

Warmly,

Vijay

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