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(Trends Wide) — US President Joe Biden’s administration has ruled Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) should be given immunity in a case brought against him by Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée. , who according to the administration was assassinated by order of the prince.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice made a court filing at the request of the State Department because bin Salman was recently appointed prime minister of Saudi Arabia and, as a result, qualifies for immunity as a foreign head of government, according to the request. It was filed Thursday night, just before the court deadline for the Justice Department to express its views in court on the issue of immunity and other arguments the prince made to have the suit dismissed. .
“Mohammed bin Salman, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is the sitting head of government and is therefore immune from this lawsuit,” the filing reads, calling Khashoggi’s killing “heinous.”
The decision is likely to provoke an angry reaction. The White House had 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, in the wake of an oil production cut by OPEC+, led by Saudi Arabia, which the administration saw as a direct affront to the US. Members of Congress, already enraged by the oil cut and calling for a reassessment, they will probably only get even more upset if the prince is granted immunity.
Both Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancée, and DAWN, the Washington-based human rights organization the late journalist founded, initially filed the lawsuit against bin Salman and 28 others in October 2020, in the United States District Court of Washington. They allege the team of assassins “kidnapped, tied up, drugged, tortured and murdered” Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul and then dismembered his body. The remains of him have not been found.
“Biden himself went back on his word, he went back on Jamal,” Cengiz told Trends Wide. “History will not forget this wrong decision.”
Cengiz too tweeted: “Biden saved the murderer by granting him immunity. He saved the criminal and involved himself in the crime. Let’s see who will save him in the afterlife?
DAWN CEO Sarah Leah Whitson called the immunity request a “shocking result” and a “huge concession” to Saudi Arabia.
“It’s really beyond ironic that President Biden has basically guaranteed impunity for Mohammed bin Salman, which is the exact opposite of what he promised to do to hold Jamal Khashoggi’s killers accountable,” Whitson told Trends Wide.
US intelligence report found MBS responsible for approving the operation
A US Intelligence Community report on Khashoggi’s assassination, released in February 2021, when Biden took office, said bin Salman approved the operation to capture or kill the journalist that ended with his assassination and dismemberment. .
Bin Salman denied the allegations and sought immunity from prosecution, arguing that his various government and royal positions granted him immunity and placed him outside the jurisdiction of US courts.
But as crown prince, bin Salman was not entitled to sovereign immunity that would normally only include a head of state, head of government or foreign minister, neither of whom was bin Salman at the time.
Then, just days before the Biden administration was supposed to rule last month on the immunity issue, bin Salman was promoted to prime minister by his father, King Salman, who would normally hold that position.
That was a “cheat” to secure so-called head-of-state immunity, DAWN’s Whitson said, after which the Justice Department called for a delay.
Now that bin Salman is prime minister, “the government should recommend that he is entitled to immunity,” said law professor William Dodge of the University of California Davis School of Law, who had previously written that the prince had no right. to immunity.
“It’s almost automatic,” Dodge said, “I think that’s why he was made prime minister to get out of this.”
The State Department was not required to make an immunity determination, but was invited by the court to do so. A spokesman said his request that bin Salman be granted immunity is based on long-standing customary and international law, rather than a reflection of current diplomatic ties or efforts.
“This Immunity Suggestion does not reflect an assessment of the merits of the case. It doesn’t talk about anything about broader politics or the state of relations,” a spokesperson for the department told Trends Wide. “This was a purely legal determination.”
The Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a Trends Wide request for comment.
Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post, was assassinated on October 2, 2018, during a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul where he went to get paperwork before marrying his Turkish fiancée. (Yasin AKGUL / AFP)
Bin Salman had also claimed immunity in a case against him brought by former Saudi anti-terror 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 its promise to punish MBS for Khashoggi’s murder, the Biden administration has not only shielded MBS from accountability in US courts, but has effectively given it a license to kill Khashoggi. more detractors and declared that he would never be held accountable,” Khalid Aljabri, son of Saad Aljabri, told Trends Wide 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 and said he is still responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.
Biden said he mentioned the murder at the beginning of their meeting and that the prince continued to deny responsibility.
“I was frank and direct in discussing it. I made my point very 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 Studies and Media 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 detail, known as the Rapid Intervention Force.”
The report noted that bin Salman viewed Khashoggi as a threat to the kingdom “and widely supported the use of violent measures, if necessary, to silence him.”
The intelligence report said they had no visibility on when the Saudis had decided to harm the father of five children. “Although Saudi officials had previously planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi, we don’t know how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him,” he said.
“A series of failures to hold Saudi leaders accountable”
Last month, on the fourth anniversary of Khashoggi’s death, DAWN demanded the Biden administration declassify and release the full intelligence report on his murder.
Khashoggi’s fiancée, Cengiz, alleges that when Khashoggi tried to obtain the documents he needed to get married at the embassy in Washington, officials “manufactured an opportunity to assassinate him.”
They told her the only place she could get the documents they needed was at the consulate in Istanbul, she said. Two weeks before her date, Khashoggi and Cengiz were married in an Islamic religious ceremony, the lawsuit says.
“The Administration’s decision to encourage the courts to uphold the sovereign immunity of MBS is another disappointing chapter in a series of failures to hold Saudi leaders accountable for the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” said a senior Democratic congressional aide. “Actions like this contradict the administration’s hollow assurances of accountability and go against our own intelligence assessments of MBS’s involvement.”
Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan told Trends Wide Friday morning that she was “stunned” when she heard the news of the immunity decision.
“I mean, we know someone was killed. So obviously I’m not comfortable this morning and I want to understand why they did what they did,” Dingell said on “Trends Wide This Morning.”
— Trends Wide’s Tierney Sneed and Shawna Mizelle contributed to this report.
