Can I be arrested in my country&#39;s embassy abroad? I am a Syrian refugee who escaped a war! In my country I am considered to have broken the law by doing this. I live in Romania and need to visit the embassy to renew my Syrian passport, as they officially announced that they are renewing passports even for people who broke the law. Can I be arrested for breaking Syrian law inside the embassy of Syria in Romania, and maybe later sent back to Syria?
The embassy is not technically the sovereign territory of the sending country; it remains the sovereign territory of the receiving country, although it does enjoy special protections from interference from the receiving country. The sending country could do anything they like to you once you enter the embassy - including hanging you for treason - as long as they keep you in the embassy. This may be illegal according to the receiving country's laws - hence illegal in actual fact, since the receiving country's laws apply in theory - but the receiving country would be legally prevented from interfering with the sending country's actions if they take place in the embassy. What if the sending country does something the receiving country disagrees with? Well, that's sort of where the law stops and politics begins. The countries can negotiate, diplomats can be expelled and embassies closed, sanctions can be imposed and wars declared. This category of thing also includes the receiving country reneging on its agreement and violating the protections of the embassy and/or its diplomats, which would create an international incident and may lead to some or all of the above. In summary: - The Syrian embassy would be violating the law of the receiving country to punish you in such a way as to break the laws of the receiving country for having broken Syrian law while you are visiting an embassy abroad - The receiving country would be violating its diplomatic and political agreements not to interfere in the embassy if it decided to interfere with the embassy if the embassy chose to broke the law of the receiving country by punishing you - If the sending country break's the receiving country's laws in a way the receiving country cares about, or if the receiving country violates the immunity of the embassy in a way the sending country cares about, there will be an international incident which will be resolved by political processes. Odds are if it gets to this stage you're not in great shape.
Although the USA don't like it, there's a department called INTERPOL which is composed by about 150 countries. When a crime is committed and you need to involve another country to solve it, the sovereignty of each County prevents a police officer from one country acting upon another country. That's when the INTERPOL comes in. They usually requests the police from that country to act up. A judge from that country will grant their local police access to the data to be delivered to the country that requested it. Can the police get a search warrant for data 'in the cloud'? Yes. If the servers are located within the boundaries of your own country, it's a normal procedure. But like the above answer states, it's easier to subpoena the records than to execute a search warrant. In a subpoena, the company itself is bound to provide everything the police asks. Can the police get a search warrant for such third party systems? Yes. If there's enough probable cause, the investigation can lead to allow the police to try and discover files that are held by servers that store the cloud data. But if the servers are located outside the country and the company does not have any office opened in the country, a search warrant won't have validity in another jurisdiction and the police can't act without breaking the sovereignty principle. That's where the INTERPOL services are handy. The department is built in the principle of polices from different countries helping each other. The downside is that it's too bureaucratic and it takes a lot of time. For instance if he has a virtual machine hosted by Amazon, would they serve the warrant on Amazon, or on the suspect? Like mentioned by @Viktor, if the company has an office within the bounds of your country, it's easier to subpoena the records because that way the company will filter and provide only the data linked to the suspect being investigated. That is, the subpoena will have both the name of the company (Amazon) and the name of the Suspect, so the company can provide only the necessary files. Update If the police lack sufficient evidence for a search warrant, but an interpol country was, for some reason, willing to work with the police to collect and provide that information would they be able to use it even if they wouldn't have been able to subpoena a US country? Hypothetically speaking, I see your follow-up as a company that do have a local office and the Federal Police was turned down by a judge on a warrant/subpoena. In that case, there's no reason for another's country police to act on their own country. The suspect is a foreign suspect, the crime is a foreign crime and the police has no reason to work on it. But for the sake of argument, let's say that the local police was turned down by a judge for lack of evidence or something and the suspect has been investigated by a foreign country or whatever. If the information that the local police desires to obtain is available through the INTERPOL, it's most likely to be accepted since it's a data stored by an international police department. In your scenario, the foreign police was granted a legal right to search and collected the data for legal purpose. Maybe they can't use it in their own country, but since they followed a safe chain of custody and provided the information to the INTERPOL, that information has legal validity and it is not fruit of the poisonous tree if the chain of custody was maintained.
The Indian Citizenship Act, 1955 §8 requires it, so from a legal perspective, you must do it. That law does not specify the consequences, and there isn't a clear limit on the possible punishment. The government does invite you to inquire about your penalty, saying The Indian Citizenship Act, 1955, does not allow dual citizenship. Holding Indian passport/acquiring Indian passport/travelling on Indian passport after acquisition of foreign citizenship constitutes an offence under the Indian Passport Act, 1967, and attracts penalties. The Government of India has prescribed imposition of penalty on a graded scale, depending on number of trips made on Indian passport after acquiring foreign nationality, for the violation of Passport Rules and retention of Indian Passport for more than 3 years after acquiring of foreign nationality. §12 of the Passport Act spells out the penalties (up to 5 years in prison and ₹50,000. If you can avoid being in illegal possession of an Indian passport, you might avoid prosecution under the act (though they probably cannot get you extradited to enforce the penalty). They certainly have the power to revoke your passport, but no provision of the law obligates you to formally apply for a passport revocation when you believe that your passport should be revoked. Unless you officially renounce your citizenship, do the paperwork, and officially surrender your passport, the government can reasonably suspect that you are illegally in possession of an illegal passport, so they are empowered to investigate, including searching and seizing. However, if you have zero interest in India, that may not matter.
Can a shopowner in Thailand ban someone from entering their shop on the grounds of their citizenship? The first tweet, explains the context properly: I’m at my local hospital this afternoon to get a medical certificate. My work permit expires soon and so I need to run around getting all the documents in order. At the hospital they wanted to check my passport before letting me in to see if I had been abroad recently. Thailand has been very popular with visitors for decades and if laws existed that discriminated against foreigners this would be commonly known. So in this case the 'discrimination' probably not because of citizenship, but more about a faulty assumption that the virus is spread by foreigners. This will have nothing to do with Thai law. The (tweet) OP quotes only another persons claim. The OP states in the first tweet that they checked his passport only to see if he was abroad recently. So he didn't share the same experience of the American. Based on that, this second hand source (that can't be verified) is probably unreliable. Due to the present (global) uncertainties, caused by the Coronavirus, one should look at the whole picture. 2020-02-04: Coronavirus: Chinese targeted as Italians panic - BBC News In Italy and elsewhere, panic is spreading much faster than the coronavirus itself. Chinese businesses are empty, shopkeepers are shutting down and Chinese nationals are being targeted. At a bar beside the Trevi fountain, a notice was put up banning customers from China. So the the situation described by the original (tweet) OP is understandable, but the quoted (but not varified) second hand source as well as the events in Italy are not. The incidents have prompted condemnation from the Italian authorities. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte reprimanded the regional governors, telling them that they were not competent to make such a call and that nothing justified such fear. Discrimination, solely due to citizenship, would be against Human Rights prevention of discrimination. Special cases may exist for prices that are subsidized and thus only for residents. Dual pricing was common in the Czech Republic until 1999, when it was ruled illegal (but still persisted). Then a foreign resident had to supply proof of residency to avoid paying the higher price. 2007: Illegal practice of dual pricing persists in Czech Republic At the time we assumed that this was legal (it was certainly understandable), but it seems that was not the case. Are the &quot;Human Rights prevention of discrimination&quot; written down somewhere? Also, who enforce them? Universal Declaration of Human | United Nations Human Rights Enforcement Mechanisms of the United Nations | ESCR-Net European Convention on Human Rights - Wikipedia European Court of Human Rights How these international laws/conventions are implemented into national laws will differ from country to country. For Germany they are anchored into the constitution: Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany Article 25 Primacy of international law The general rules of international law shall be an integral part of federal law. They shall take precedence over the laws and directly create rights and duties for the inhabitants of the federal territory. and are enforced by the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) and can be passed on to the European Court of Justice (or European Court of Human Rights) should the need arise. Thailand: Part of Section 30 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand 2007: Unjust discrimination against a person on the grounds of the difference in origin, race, language, sex, age, disability, physical or health condition, personal status, economic or social standing, religious belief, education or constitutionally political view, shall not be permitted.
Was International Law Violated? When it used chemical weapons to kill large numbers of civilians in his own country, Assad's regime in Syria was violating its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international treaty obligation that the regime acknowledged was binding upon it in 2013 when at U.S. insistence and with Russian supervision, the Assad regime purported to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles. It was also an action violating generally recognized standards of the customary international law of war that have been recognized since they were first clearly articulated in the Geneva Protocol of 1925 that took effect in 1928. This kind of action has also been recognized as a crime against humanity under customary international law, and this principle is why international criminal tribunals set up after crimes against humanity occur are not considered to be applying ex post facto laws. Also, since early on in the Syrian Civil War, during the Obama Administration, the U.S. ceased to recognize Assad's regime as the legitimate government of Syria. According to official U.S. policy, since 2012, the Syrian National Council, and not Assad's regime, has been the legitimate government of Syria. So, rather than being an attack on a sovereign regime, this was an act in defense of a different sometimes allied regime recognized as legitimate, with whom the U.S. is not at war. Moreover, given that fact that the U.S. now has a artillery combat ground troop unit deployed in Northern Syria as of earlier in 2017, in support of a Congressionally authorized military action in the same theater of conflict, the U.S. has a legitimate interest in protecting its own troops, as well as those of allies it supports in the part of the conflict that it is involved in under the 2001 AUMF, from chemical weapons attacks in Syria by preemptively disabling the Assad regime's ability to deploy those weapons, even though they were not directed at somewhat nearby U.S. forces in their most recent utilization this week. So, while there may not be entirely clear international legal authorization for this particular remedy for the Assad regime's clear violation of international law, there is not a clear prohibition on doing so either, and the general rule is that sovereign states have wide discretion to take military action in support of their perceived interests, particular when violations international obligations of the offender targeted for military action provide a justification for the use of military force under international law. This is because the main way of punishing a violation of international war while a conflict is still pending is called a reprisal which the Syrian strike fits to a tee. A reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. . . . Reprisals refer to acts which are illegal if taken alone, but become legal when adopted by one state in retaliation for the commission of an earlier illegal act by another state. Article XII(3) of the Chemical Weapons Convention authorizes those remedies allowed under customary international law of which reprisal is one. Did The President Have Authority To Make The Strike Under U.S. Law? This said, the harder issue is whether this strike was legal under U.S. law, and not international law, which really has no meaningful binding enforcement mechanism other than politics, diplomacy and domestic law anyway. While the U.S. does not recognize the Assad regime as legitimate, it is not actually at war with that regime because the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from 2001 that has been the main legal authorization for the "war on terror" against ISIS, pretty clear does not extend to Assad's regime in Syria. ISIS has been declared to be a successor to a branch of the organization the launched the 9-11 attack upon which the AUMF declared war. But, the formerly legitimate government of Syria (Assad's regime) is very difficult to treat as coming within that definition. However, while Congress has not authorized the use of military force by the U.S. against the Assad regime in Syria in this manner, Congress has approved appropriations to fund and support anti-Assad rebels, even though it may have been a bit of a fiasco, which at least provides some tacit evidence of Congressional consent to some sort of involvement in the Syrian civil war by the United States government against Assad's regime. In absence of an authorization of use of military force against the Assad regime, one alternative source of legal authority to make this strike is legislation (whose constitutionality has often been questioned, but has never actually challenged, was determined by the Justice Department to be constitutional in 1980, and which is arguably not justiciable) called the War Powers Act of 1973. This Act, on its face, purports to give the President the authority to make limited use of military force for short periods of time. Specifically (per the link): It provides that the U.S. President can send U.S. Armed Forces into action abroad only by declaration of war by Congress, "statutory authorization," or in case of "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." The War Powers Resolution requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30-day withdrawal period, without a Congressional authorization for use of military force (AUMF) or a declaration of war by the United States. The question of whether this incident is within the scope of the War Powers Act is disputed with U.S. Senator Rand Paul arguing the conditions triggering its use such as an attack on U.S. forces or the United States, have not been met. The issues presented by this incident under the War Powers Act are similar to those presented in the missile strike and follow up airstrikes made by the U.S. in Libya in 2011. There is also legitimate room for dispute regarding where the authority of the President as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution ends, and where the power of Congress to declare war and to enact other legislation pertaining to the U.S. military under Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution begins. Arguably, directing U.S. forces to make an isolated military strike from a location where they are already lawfully deployed in support of an AUMF authorized military mission in the region, in exigent circumstances, against a military force that is not recognized by the United States as the legitimate government of Syria, does not constitute a true act of war and is instead merely day to day management of the operations and discipline of the United States military that is within the Commander in Chief's authority, particularly when Congress has already tentatively recognized the Syria's Assad regime is an enemy of the United States in legislation short of an authorization for use of military force. Moreover, given that President Trump surely has majority support in both houses of Congress for this strike, the possibility that Congress may end up granting forgiveness rather than making much of the fact that he didn't ask for permission, may be mostly a formality in this case. Generally speaking, even if this issue is justiciable (i.e. amenable to resolution through the court system), court action to enforce separation of powers questions must be authorized, at least, by a resolution of a majority of one of the two houses of Congress. Generally speaking, taxpayer standing or just plain U.S. citizen standing, does not exist to enjoin or seek a remedy from a separation of powers violation.
Question: Do I need a EU passport or EU ID card to legally work in the EU (or establish that I have the right to work in the EU)? Or is a certificate of citizenship sufficient? Legally, your right to work is not contingent on this and there is no Europe-wide rule that makes holding any document mandatory. Importantly, if you do start working anyway, you are not committing a crime and cannot possibly be banned or forced to leave the country. You do have the right to work from the day you became an EU citizen and if any doubt arises down the line, you should be able to clear it up later. In practice, employers are sometimes supposed to check you are allowed to work (and for that would require some proof of your citizenship) but they don't necessarily need a passport or ID. What's typical on the other hand is that you have to provide an official proof of address (in the countries where you have to register your address with the authorities) and the local social security, insurance, or national tax number. Both of these will require dealing with the authorities and will be considerably more difficult, if not downright impossible, without a national ID card or passport (in fact it can even be difficult with a passport). I worked in multiple EU countries and I don't recall always having to present my ID to employers. I recall at least one instance (in Germany) where I could start working without one (it had just been stolen) and another one (in the Netherlands) where I started on the day after I arrived, without official address nor tax number (BSN). In both cases, I was expected to solve these issues within the first month and you risk a fine if you don't register within a week or two but it was neither illegal nor impossible to start working before all the formalities were completed. None of this means I would be completely comfortable about being months without a passport. But the main issue for you will be entering the country and what your employer's HR department is prepared to tolerate, not any sort of legal obligation to hold a passport to work. Note that in one of the cases I described above I went to the local consulate to get an emergency passport. It wouldn't have been possible back in my country of citizenship but there are some special procedures when you reside abroad. These rules change all the time and depend on your country of citizenship but that could be worth a try.
The most important rule for an extradition from Germany is this: If the role of the countries were reversed, would the person be convicted in Germany according to German law? You say the link claims that he couldn't be convicted now, because he would have been convicted twice for the same crime. So he wouldn't be convicted in Germany if the roles of the countries were reversed, therefore no extradition. (The next important rule is this: There must be enough evidence that the person would be prosecuted in Germany, not necessarily convicted. You also need to convince the court that the accused will get a fair trial when extradited, that there will be no cruel or unusual punishment, including death sentence, and lastly there is no extradition for small crimes when the extradition plus having to appear in a foreign court can be considered worse punishment than the actual punishment for the crime. All these irrelevant in this case, I think). "Auslieferung unstatthaft" just means "extradition inadmissible" or "extradition illegal". PS. Ludl asked "shouldn't there be some law that if someone cannot be extradited from Germany because of extradition law, they can still be prosecuted in Germany". That would be completely unnecessary. Let's say one US citizen murders another one in Germany, the USA asks for extradition (they wouldn't, because it is a German matter, but they could ask of course), and Germany rightfully refuses. Then since it is a murder on German ground, it will be prosecuted in Germany. It would be absurd to think that a failed extradition request could protect a murderer.
Foreign citizens are just as entitled to Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure as American citizens are. The case you cited was, in fact, a South Korean citizen who successfully had evidence suppressed from an unjustified border search.