Finally, today, we get at least an attempt at an explanation of President Obama’s dead-of-night decision on December 16 to grant Interpol — the international police force — immunity from American law. (See here and here.) Unfortunately, in the habit to which we’ve grown accustomed, the Obama administration itself didn’t provide the explanation. It comes from Interpol’s secretary general, Ron Noble, via an informative report by Valerie Richardson at Human Events. (Ms. Richardson, who quotes from my posts in her story, was good enough to call me for comment; I regret that, because of the press of other business, I didn’t retrieve the message until after I learned early this morning that her story was posted.)

The biggest problem with President Obama’s immunity grant is that it came without any explanation. The administration can’t or won’t explain why a president — whose administration is notoriously indifferent to American sovereignty — suddenly decided Interpol needed to be freed from the U.S. Constitution and other American law. Certainly, Interpol was not clamoring publicly for immunity; neither Noble nor any other Interpol official was heard to suggest that American law was interfering with some aspect or other of its operations.

Why does Interpol suddenly need diplomatic immunity? Noble explained that when President Reagan signed the original order, the organization didn’t have a permanent U.S. staff or office. That changed in 2004 with the opening of the Office of the Interpol Special Representative to the United Nations.

The revisions bring Interpol’s U.S. office in line with its other seven international offices, all of which already enjoy full diplomatic immunity. “It’s international custom that international organization are exempt from FOIA,” said Noble. “We’re no different than any other international organization.”

That doesn’t begin to cut it. An agency’s having a permanent U.S. presence is more of a reason to bind it by U.S. law, not a rationale for immunizing it. And Interpol apparently has had no difficulty operating under the Reagan-era restraints during the five years since its permanent office opened. Moreover, as Richardson points out, Interpol is not just “any other international organization”; it is an international law-enforcement organization. As I’ve explained before, “what prevents law-enforcement and its controlling government authority from becoming tyrannical” are the constraints of law — in the U.S., such provisions as the Fourth Amendment, the Freedom of Information Act, and other limitations of the Constitution and federal law that protect the liberty and privacy of Americans.

AMERICA: JUST ANOTHER COUNTRY
Advertently or not, however, Noble does tip us to President Obama’s thinking — and to why the administration clearly doesn’t want to discuss the matter any further. The issue is what Noble refers to as “international custom”; relatedly, this is about the game known as “customary international law,” so beloved by transnational progressives.

Here’s how the game works. International-law professors, jurists, and bureaucrats announce some piety that they think everyone should follow (e.g., the death penalty is an unconscionable human-rights violation). Once enough of them have followed it for long enough (in recent years, “long enough” seems to have become “ten minutes” . . . or the time it takes to announce these new international standards), the piety is deemed — at least by transnationalists — to be universally binding. In their view, it thus becomes the obligation of every nation to fall into line, changing their laws to whatever extent is necessary to do so. That is, the sensibilities of the “international community” (i.e., the elites of the global Left) void the democratic self-determinism of the American people.

In 1983, President Reagan thought about the issue of diplomatic immunity for Interpol and decided that the agency merited limited protection but, because it was a police force, not unqualified protection. Significant privileges and immunities, he determined, should be withheld: Interpol’s property and assets should remain subject to search and seizure, and its archived records should remain subject to public scrutiny. That made good sense. If it hadn’t made good sense, Congress could have enacted corrective legislation — and surely Interpol would have complained. Everyone, however, was content, and for over a quarter-century the arrangement has worked.