State Department imposes US citizenship on diplomats’ children for pressure — diplomat

MOSCOW, May 4. /TASS/. The US Department of State’s policy to impose US citizenship on children of Russian diplomats is a yet another attempt to put pressure on Russian diplomatic personnel in the country, Russian Foreign Ministry’s Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, said. "The arbitrary granting of US citizenship to such children potentially provides Washington with a lever for improper pressure on our personnel - what if a child were to be abducted under the pretext, for example, of juvenile law or the need to verify gender compliance as part of another wave of the new normal? We have seen many such examples," she wrote in an article for Vedomosti. "Coercive actions against the personnel of our diplomatic missions contradict the norms of international law and bilateral agreements, which guarantee immunity from the jurisdiction of the host country. With regard to consular staff, the State Department is obliged to be guided by the provisions of the 1964 bilateral Consular Convention, which grants this category of Russian citizens a broader scope of immunities than the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations," Zakharova added. In her words, "according to Article 24 of the 1964 Convention, consular officers or employees, as well as members of their families, are exempt from all forms of compulsory obligations." "For more than 60 years since the conclusion of the 1964 Consular Convention, it has been interpreted and applied by the parties as excluding the possibility of forcibly extending the citizenship of the host state to the children of consular officers and employees of the sending state. And it is not only a matter of the letter of the law," the spokeswoman said.