Far from it. From 1997 till 2002, they racked up a tab totaling well over $18 million. The problem wasn’t that diplomats can’t be issued parking tickets. Envoys to the United Nations in Manhattan racked up 150,000 unpaid parking tickets between 19 - with little repercussion. “In the five years from 1997 to 2002, United Nations diplomats were cited for 150,000 parking tickets that went unpaid - more than eighty per day,” Klaas writes.įormer Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to bully them into paying, and in 1997 he accused the United Nations of “acting like the worst kind of deadbeats.” But Giuliani’s tough words had little effect. The loophole leads many diplomats to cheat the system, according to the new book “ Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us” (Scribner), by Brian Klaas, who uses the simple example of parking violations to illustrate how they abuse their power. In 1987, Afghan envoy Shah Mohammad Dost demanded a pedestrian holding a parking spot surrender it at once. There are around 100,000 foreign diplomats, including their dependents, currently living in the US - and some, like Dost, have broken local laws and faced zero consequences. Curry later recovered from her injuries, and Dost wasn’t even questioned about the assault - thanks to his diplomatic immunity. Margaret Curry, 42, was sent to the hospital in Flushing, Queens, after being hit by Dost’s ’78 Lincoln.
But, in 1987, Afghan envoy Shah Mohammad Dost pulled over and demanded the pedestrian surrender the parking spot immediately, insisting that being a diplomat gave him the right to take it.Īnd when she refused, he drove into her and took the spot anyway. If you’re like most people, you keep driving. You’re looking for a parking spot in Queens and notice a pedestrian guarding an available space, waiting for a car that has not yet arrived. US considers flying diplomats’ families out of Ukraine: report South Korean diplomat sucker-punched in unprovoked NYC attack To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: diplomatic compound hotbed of Russian espionage: report In November 2007 the ACLU created our own spreadsheet of the 59 cases we were aware of to date, containing as many details as we were able to access about the workers, diplomats, and types of abuses.Īs Caroline Frederickson wrote yesterday on the Huffington Post, legislation is required to tackle the web of problems that have allowed these injustices to continue for so long. The report is a first step towards documenting diplomatic abuse and exploitation, but in leaving out any details about the 42 cases it investigated, it fails to bring to light the reality of this problem. government to address this problem: there is no systematic tracking or protection of workers who are brought to the U.S. The GAO report both documents and is itself an illustration of one of the key failures of the U.S. Just last week, in a statement of interest filed with the court in a case brought on behalf of three Indian women enslaved by a Kuwaiti diplomat, the State Department, as it has in the past, insisted that United States courts can do nothing to hold foreign diplomats accountable for extreme human rights abuses, even when the abuses rise to the level of human trafficking and slavery. But thus far, the State Department has refused to accept responsibility for what happens to these workers once they have arrived in the U.S.
law enforcement and as a result of the power the visa arrangement gives diplomats over their workers’ ability to remain in this country. The State Department issues each of these domestic workers a special visa to come to this country to work for a specific diplomat, and the Department is well aware of the extremely vulnerable position this puts the workers in – both because diplomats’ homes (to which domestic workers are often confined) are off-limits to U.S. As described by Kirk Semple on the New York Times blog, this is a widespread but largely hidden problem that is greatly exacerbated by the shield of diplomatic immunity and the government’s refusal to hold diplomats responsible even in the most egregious cases. Earlier this week, the Government Accountability Office released a human rights report (PDF) documenting the abuse and exploitation of domestic workers by foreign diplomats in the U.S.
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