by AHMAD NOORANI
In the 1997 case, Gueorgui Makharadze, the Georgian ambassador in Washington, had killed an American teenager in a road accident. The then US president Bill Clinton had flatly refused to grant diplomatic immunity to the Georgian diplomat and consequently Makharadze was sentenced to 21 years by a US court.
According to the New York Times, United States had exerted extreme pressure on the Georgian government to lift the diplomatic immunity for the ambassador even though it was not a deliberate shoot to death killing, but a car accident.
Washington’s reaction was similar when Pakistan’s New York-based permanent representative to the UN, Munir Akram, got involved in a case involving his live-in girlfriend. In a minor case of very little significance in 1982, a North Korean diplomat grabbed a woman’s breasts in a park in Eastchester, outside New York City and then took shelter in his country’s UN mission for 10 months before he finally pleaded guilty of a minor charge and then left the country.
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