The Biden administration said Thursday night that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince should be considered immune from a lawsuit over his role in the death of a U.S.-based journalist.
The opinion marks a change from President Joe Biden’s campaign trail censure of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
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A filing released late Thursday said Salman’s recent promotion to prime minister meant he was the “sitting head of government and, accordingly, immune” from a civil lawsuit filed by Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and Democracy for the Arab World Now, a rights group he founded, according to the Guardian.
“The United States government has expressed grave concerns regarding Jamal Khashoggi’s horrific killing and has raised these concerns publicly and with the most senior levels of the Saudi government,” the Department of Justice said in its filing.
“However, the doctrine of head of state immunity is well established in customary international law and has been consistently recognized in longstanding executive branch practice as a status-based determination that does not reflect a judgment on the underlying conduct at issue in the litigation,” the filing continued.
Rooted in international law, the concept of sovereign immunity protects states and their officials from some legal proceedings in other foreign states’ domestic courts.
The request for immunity is nonbinding, with the decision ultimately left to a judge.
“It’s beyond ironic that President Biden has single-handedly assured [Mohammed bin Salman] can escape accountability when it was President Biden who promised the American people he would do everything to hold him accountable,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN, said in a statement.
Saudi officials are believed to have killed and dismembered Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, according to the Associated Press.
As a presidential candidate, during a CNN town hall in 2019, Biden said he thought Khashoggi’s killing was “flat-out murder” and that “we should treat it that way, and there should be consequences relating to how we deal with those — that power.”
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However, Biden has sought to ease tensions with Saudi Arabia as the United States works to persuade the kingdom to undo a series of cuts in oil production.
“It’s impossible to read the Biden administration’s move today as anything more than a capitulation to Saudi pressure tactics, including slashing oil output to twist our arms to recognize MBS’s fake immunity ploy,” Whitson said.
