Foreign Official in the United States

Immunity of State Officials in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976

Individual Foreign Officials and Agents

According to research about Foreign Official from the Federal Judicial Center:For some years, courts debated whether the FSIA should apply to claims against individual foreign government officials for actions taken in their official capacities on behalf of foreign states. A majority of circuits answered in the affirmative, following the socalled Chuidian doctrine, which treated individual officials as “agencies or instrumentalities” for FSIA purposes; other circuits held the opposite. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved the issue in favor of the minority view, rejecting the Chuidian doctrine and holding in Samantar v. Yousuf that an individual foreign official sued for conduct undertaken in his or her personal capacity is not a “foreign state” entitled to immunity from suit within the meaning of the FSIA.100 The Court found nothing in the text or legislative history of the statute to suggest that the term “foreign state” should be read to include an official acting on its behalf, nor any reason to presume that when Congress codified state immunity, it also intended to codify the immunity of individual foreign government officials. The Court took care, however, to note that a suit against such an official may nonetheless be precluded by principles of foreign sovereign immunity under the common law, following the practice that governed the immunity of individual foreign government officials prior to 1976. In this case, it remanded the suit for a determination whether Samantar might be entitled to immunity under the common law or have other valid defenses.101 It also noted that in some cases an action against an official in his or her official capacity should be treated as a suit against the entity as the “real party” in interest.

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Popular Topics related with Foreign Official

• Foreign Immunity
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