Diplomaticsexcrimesgounpunished

Diplomatic sex crimes go unpunished
By GREG WESTON -- Sun Media--February 8, 2001
A longtime senior executive in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the department has helped to cover up several cases of foreign diplomats smuggling children into Canada, abusing them as underpaid embassy domestics, and sexually assaulting them.
The high-ranking official said "some countries (embassies) will bring in children they claim were their own. And in the end, you find out -- if you find out at all -- you find out that this child is not their child, that she is a child who has been brought in (to Canada) as a servant ... is underpaid ... doesn't have access to schools or benefits, and in some cases may be sexually assaulted by (diplomatic) family members."
He declined to name the offending diplomats or their embassies -- only that one was "Eastern European, but not Russian."
And what did Foreign Affairs do in these cases?
Our source said in at least one case, there were officials who "fought like hell" to do absolutely nothing, lest the department might offend the countries in question.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley has promised to get to the bottom of the recent fiasco of his department twiddling its collective thumbs while a Russian diplomat repeatedly drove drunk around Ottawa. He finally mowed down two Ottawa women out for a stroll, killing one and badly injuring the other, and claimed diplomatic immunity.
As my esteemed colleague Douglas Fisher noted yesterday, Manley got completely bamboozled by his bureaucrats over the drunk Russian incident. "One can only hope he (Manley) sticks to his guns, gets a full accounting, and disciplines those involved," Fisher said.
While he's at it, perhaps Manley could ask for an accounting of his officials' actions in dealing with diplomatic pedophiles and other sexual predators with red licence plates.
Our source says most such cases come to the attention of the department when the abused children, in desperation, finally go to the local Canadian police for protection.
Canadian police forces, of course, are powerless to do anything. The offending diplomats have immunity from prosecution, and aren't likely to waive it to face charges of raping little girls in their care.
One would hope Canadian authorities might at least intervene to remove these obviously frightened and abused children from danger until they can be safely sent back home to their real families. But police say even that is fraught with diplomatic nonsense since the girls are technically the children of these monster diplomats until proven otherwise.
And what of the venerable Department of Foreign Affairs?
Our source says in at least one of these cases, Foreign Affairs types tried to get the department to ignore the matter altogether.
"They had an official visit coming up involving that country, and they were screaming at the protocol people not to do anything (to the offending diplomat) because it might screw up the visit ..."
In the end, apparently, someone at the highest level of the department had to intervene on the side of common sense and decency. "He said screw the visit, and the department told them (the offending country) that either they lift his (the pedophile's) immunity, or he goes home, because what he has done is dreadful."
Our source says he does not recall the department actually kicking the diplomat out of the country by officially declaring him "personna non grata" -- or PNG as it is known in the diplo-world.
"We probably just used moral suasion. We didn't often make it an official PNG. That's a big deal ... But they (the offending embassy) are smart enough to know we would have used it if the guy had not left the country on his own."
If Minister Manley is truly intent on getting to the bottom of what ails his department, he had best put on his hip-waders. If he hasn't already figured it out, he is about to wade into a cesspool of bureaucratic arrogance, secrecy and butt-covering like no other in government (except, perhaps, National Defence).

Canadian taxpayers deserve better. And so do those little girls.