The Law Of Consular Access

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of litigation at the international and domestic levels concerning consular access for foreign nationals charged with a criminal offence. The issue has complicated relations between countries, with the majority of litigation involving the United States, which has adopted a restrictive view of the consular access obligation. This book brings together for the first time relevant documentary sources on the law of consular access. The book includes significant excerpts alongside commentary on the documents, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. While presenting information on the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the book presents other sources, including bilateral consular agreements, multilateral treaties, and key court cases from various jurisdictions. Many of these sources are not readily accessible. The Law of Consular Access will be of interest to scholars of international law, human rights, and international relations. It will also be of interest to private and government lawyers, as well as diplomats and consuls.

The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations has for over 50 years been central to diplomacy and applied to all forms of relations among sovereign States. Participation is almost universal. The rules giving special protection to ambassadors are the oldest established in international law and the Convention is respected almost everywhere. But understanding it as a living instrument requires knowledge of its background in customary international law, of the negotiating history which clarifies many of its terms and the subsequent practice of states and decisions of national courts which have resolved other ambiguities. Diplomatic Law provides this in-depth Commentary. The book is an essential guide to changing methods of modern diplomacy and shows how challenges to its regime of special protection for embassies and diplomats have been met and resolved. It is used by ministries of foreign affairs and cited by domestic courts world-wide. The book analyzes the reasons for the widespread observance of the Convention rules and why in the special case of communications - where there is flagrant violation of their special status - these reasons do not apply. It describes how abuse has been controlled and how the immunities in the Convention have survived onslaught by those claiming that they should give way to conflicting entitlements to access to justice and the desire to punish violators of human rights. It describes how the duty of diplomats not to interfere in the internal affairs of the host State is being narrowed in the face of the communal international responsibility to monitor and uphold human rights.

2nd edition published in 1990.

This book brings together the relevant documentary sources on the law of consular access, with significant excerpts set alongside commentary on the documents. As well as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the book also includes other sources, such as bilateral and multilateral treaties, and key court cases from various jurisdictions.

Consular Affairs and Diplomacy analyses the nature of diplomacy’s consular dimension in international relations. It contributes to our understanding of key themes in consular affairs today, the challenges that are facing the three great powers, as well as the historical origins of the consular institution.

Beyond Human Rights, previously published in German and now available in English, is a historical and doctrinal study about the legal status of individuals in international law.

It gives me great pleasure to write a foreword to :\1r. Sen's excellent book, and for two reasons in particular. In the first place, in producing it, Mr. Sen has done something vvhich I have long felt needed to be done, and which I at one time had am bitions to do myself. \Vhen, over thirty years ago, and after some years of practice at the Bar, I first entered the legal side of the British Foreign Service, I had not been working for long in the Foreign Office before I conceived the idea of writing - or at any rate compiling - a book to which (in my own mind) I gave the title of "A ~fanual of Foreign Office Law. " This work, had I ever produced it in the form in which I visualised it, could probably not have been published con sistently with the requirements of official discretion. But this did not worry me as I was only contemplating something for private circulation within the Service and in Government circles. :Mr. Sen's aim has been broader and more public-spirited than mine was; but its basis is essentially the same.