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US rules Saudi prince immune in case brought by Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée

The administration of US President Joe Biden has ruled that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be granted immunity in a case brought against him by the fiancée of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who the government has said was murdered under the prince’s orders.

A court case was filed by Department of Justice lawyers at the request of the State Department because Bin Salman was recently named Saudi prime minister and, as a result, qualifies for immunity as head of foreign government, the request said. It was filed Thursday night, just before the court’s deadline for the Justice Department to rule on the immunity issue and the prince’s other arguments for the suit to be dismissed.

“Mohammed bin Salman, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is the acting head of government and is therefore immune from this process,” the document says, calling the killing “heinous”.

The decision is likely to provoke a backlash. The White House hoped that President Joe Biden’s July trip to Saudi Arabia would put the rocky US-Saudi relationship back on track, but since then, relations have only continued to sour.

The relationship is being reassessed, the White House said, following a cut in oil production by OPEC+, led by Saudi Arabia, which the administration saw as a direct affront to the United States. Members of Congress, already enraged by the oil cut and calling for a reassessment, are likely to be even angrier if the prince is granted immunity.

Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancée, and the Washington-based human rights organization the late journalist founded, DAWN, initially filed suit against bin Salman and 28 others in October 2020 in the Federal District Court in Washington, DC. They claim the team of assassins “kidnapped, bound, drugged, tortured and murdered” Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and then dismembered his body. His remains were never found.

DAWN Executive Director Sarah Leah Whitson called the immunity request a “shocking result” and a “massive concession” to Saudi Arabia.

“It’s really ironic that President Biden has basically given a guarantee of impunity to Mohammed bin Salman, which is the exact opposite of what he promised to do to hold Jamal Khashoggi’s killers accountable,” Whitson said. CNN 🇧🇷

A U.S. intelligence community report on the Khashoggi assassination published in February 2021, when Biden took office, said Bin Salman approved the operation to capture or kill the journalist, which ended with his assassination and dismemberment.

Bin Salman denied the allegations and sought immunity from prosecution, claiming that his various government and royal posts gave him immunity and placed him outside the jurisdiction of US courts.

But as crown prince, bin Salman was not entitled to sovereign immunity, which would normally only include a head of state, head of government or foreign minister, none of whom bin Salman was.

Then, just days before the Biden administration weighed in last month on the immunity issue, bin Salman was promoted to prime minister by his father, King Salman, who would normally hold that post.

That was a “ploy” to secure the head of state’s so-called immunity, DAWN’s Whitson said, after the Justice Department asked for a delay.

Now that Bin Salman is prime minister, “the government should recommend that he be entitled to immunity,” said law professor William Dodge of the University of California Davis School of Law, who had previously written that the prince was not entitled. to immunity.

“It’s almost automatic,” said Dodge, “I think that’s why he was appointed prime minister to get out of this.”

The State Department was not required to determine immunity, but was asked to do so by the court. A spokesman said his request that bin Salman be given immunity is based on long-standing common and international law, and not a reflection of current ties or diplomatic efforts.

“This suggestion of immunity does not reflect an assessment of the merits of the case. It says nothing about broader policy or the state of relations,” a department spokesperson told CNN 🇧🇷 “This was a purely legal determination.”

The Saudi embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bin Salman also claimed immunity from a lawsuit brought against him by former Saudi counterterrorism official Saad Aljabri, who accused the prince of sending a hit squad to kill him in Canada just days after Khashoggi’s murder. That case was dismissed for other reasons by the same court.

“After breaking his promise to punish MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] for Khashoggi’s murder, the Biden administration not only shielded MBS from liability in US courts, but effectively issued a license to kill more detractors and declared he would never be held accountable,” Aljabri’s son, Khalid, told the CNN On thursday.

The White House was widely criticized for Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia in July, when the president awkwardly punched the crown prince he said was still responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.

Biden said he raised the murder earlier in the meeting and that the prince continued to deny being responsible.

“I was direct and direct when discussing it. I made my vision crystal clear,” Biden said.

The four-page US intelligence community report released in 2021 said the 15-person Saudi team that arrived in Istanbul in October 2018, when Khashoggi was killed, included members associated with the Saudi Center for Media Studies and Affairs (CSMARC). ) at the Royal Court, led by a close adviser to bin Salman, as well as “seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s elite personal protection detachment, known as the Rapid Intervention Force”.

The report noted that bin Salman viewed Khashoggi as a threat to the kingdom “and widely supported by the use of violent measures, if necessary, to silence him”.

The intelligence report said they had no visibility into when the Saudis decided to injure the father of five. “While Saudi authorities pre-planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi, we do not know how far in advance Saudi authorities decided to harm him,” he said.

Last month, on the fourth anniversary of Khashoggi’s death, DAWN demanded that the Biden administration declassify and publish the full intelligence report on his assassination.

Khashoggi’s fiancée Cengiz alleges that when Khashoggi tried to obtain the papers they needed to get married at the embassy in Washington, DC, authorities “manufactured an opportunity to assassinate him.”

They told him the only place he could get the documents they needed was at the consulate in Istanbul, she said. Two weeks before his appointment on October 2, 2018, the day he was killed, Khashoggi and Cengiz were married in an Islamic religious ceremony, the lawsuit says.

“The government’s decision to encourage the courts to uphold MBS’s sovereign immunity is yet another disappointing chapter in a series of failures to hold the Saudi leadership accountable for the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” said a Democratic congressional aide. “Actions like this contradict empty assurances of government accountability and run counter to our own intelligence assessments of MBS involvement.”

Source: CNN Brasil

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