Many of us have watched Law & Order or some other type of police drama, and have seen instances where 
the perpetrator of the crime is some kind of foreign diplomat. Some movies have that as well. And, because they’re a foreign diplomat, they get away with some fairly heinous stuff because the police can’t touch them. You’re probably wondering how true this stuff is.
In this case, it’s pretty true. The only thing that can happen to a foreign diplomat in this country is that they can be given a traffic ticket. They may never have to pay on it, because they can’t be arrested for having multiple traffic tickets without paying for them, but they can be issued these citations.
However, for everything else, they have immunity from prosecution in this country. That includes murder, kidnapping, theft, etc. That may not sound fair, but the truth is that our diplomats in other countries get the same type of immunity from prosecution while in other places. It’s an old tradition that was reinforced with the Geneva Convention. Its initial rules were created so that representatives of other countries could conduct business for those countries without having to worry about dealing with law enforcement getting in the way.
What keeps diplomats from running amok in our country? These people don’t get off scot free in all instances. Sure, they’re immune from prosecution at the time in another country. But there are three things that can happen.
The first is the offended country can ask the other country to waive the rights of immunity for that person. That request has been made multiple times, but it’s rarely come to fruition, although there was one case where the diplomat had killed a few people driving while intoxicated, and his government waived it.
The second is that the host country can oust the diplomat in something that’s really known as “persona non grata,” which we all know but never figured it actually applied to anything. That’s how diplomats are expelled, and that happens often, most of the time for being accused of spying instead of criminal activity, but it happens.
The third thing is that a country might not allow the loss of diplomatic immunity, but will recall the diplomat and try them within their own system. That happens more often than people know, and they get convicted more often that not also. Those that don’t go to trial usually get demoted drastically or fired. In the end, almost everyone gets what’s coming to them.
