Month: August 2012

Irony and paradox, as elements of art, add texture, depth and complexity.

The same is true in life, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the ever-surprising case of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and for many a champion of the freedom of information, a resister of arbitrary authority and a defender of the public interest.

Holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy for the past two months in the swank Knightsbridge district of London, Mr. Assange has been granted asylum but is locked in a stand-off with British authorities over his bid to leave the UK. There have been reports that Britain is prepared to suspend the Embassy’s diplomatic status and enter the premises in order to execute a court order and arrest and extradite Assange to Sweden, where he faces lurid allegations of sexual impropriety.

I believe that threat unlikely to be executed.

Diplomatic premises are deemed inviolable under the Vienna Convention, and those conventions are widely enforced. While it is true that under situations of exceptional instability the protections afforded by the Convention are occasionally breached – think of the US Embassies in Saigon in 1975 or Tehran in 1979 – the effective removal of the Ecuadorean Embassy’s sovereign immunity would under these circumstances be very difficult to justify, even if a national legal basis exists.

Respect for international law is an important plank in UK foreign policy, and Britain would not likely wish to establish a precedent which would invite retaliation against its own representatives abroad.

In a world network node like London, moreover, the media coverage attending any forced removal would be a PR disaster.

Still, a decision to abstain from storming the chancery does not mean that British authorities must grant Mr. Assange safe passage should he attempt to leave the Embassy. The upshot of it all is that unless something fundamental changes, Assange may find himself a guest of his Ecuadorean  hosts for a some time.

That might not suit him; unlike the members of the shadowy hacker collective Anonymous, Assange relishes the spotlight. It was through his talk show on Russia Today that he met the person who is now his most useful advocate, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.

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Much of my time during 30 years at DFAIT – in addition to performing many and varied day jobs – was spent doing whatever I could to encourage reform. Trying to change the system from within did not result in 20 years of boredom – far from it. And that protracted struggle may even have helped to get me elected to a record five terms on the Executive Committee of PAFSO, the diplomats’ professional association and bargaining unit.

On balance, however, except for vivid memories, some entertaining anecdotes  and a few useful lessons learned, I have little to show for my efforts at encouraging better public policy and administration.

Looking back, what had changed over three decades?

Not the number of levels in the organizational hierarchy, which remains the same at seven between desk officer and Deputy Minister.

Not the bureaucratic culture, which remains cloistered, conservative, almost inert.

By my reckoning, DFAIT now has fewer friends, less influence, and more diminished discretionary resources than… probably ever.

This amounts to just about the opposite of what has become of the Canadian military, whose star, relative to other federal government departments and agencies, has in recent years continued to rise.

So…Does the sidelining and marginalization of Canada’s foreign ministry really matter?

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