Biden administration declares Beblawi immune from federal lawsuit alleging torture

The Biden administration has formally declared that former Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi has diplomatic immunity from a lawsuit filed by Egyptian-American citizen Mohamed Soltan in a federal court last year, accusing Beblawi of targeting him for an attempted extrajudicial killing and for the “direction of and oversight” of acts of torture against him.

The US Justice Department filed a declaration with the court on April 1 certifying Beblawi’s diplomatic status. “Beblawi enjoyed diplomatic status at the time of commencement of this suit; the Court should accept State’s certification of El Beblawi’s status and decline to second-guess its basis,” the statement reads. The statement also made clear that the US government “does not take a position in its submission as to the merits of Plaintiffs’ allegations, and its submission should not be understood as reflecting a determination regarding the underlying allegations in this case.”

Soltan’s lawyers have until April 19 to formally respond, after which the court will rule on whether the lawsuit can proceed or will be dismissed on the grounds that Beblawi is immune from suit.

Soltan was arrested in Cairo in August 2013 and later sentenced to life in prison on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization and conspiring to overthrow the regime. In May 2015, after spending over 600 days in prison, he was released and flown to the United States after appeals from the Obama administration. According to details he filed in the lawsuit, during his 21 months in prison, Soltan was denied medical care for a bullet wound, beaten unconscious, burned, held in solitary confinement and forced to listen to the sounds of his father, who was also arrested in August 2013, being tortured in a nearby cell. He lost more than 70 kilograms in weight over the course of a 16-month hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.

In June 2020, Soltan filed the lawsuit in federal district court in Washington DC under the Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA), a domestic US law passed in 1991 to implement requirements of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The TPVA allows victims of torture of any nationality to file civil suits in US courts against those allegedly liable for torture or inhumane treatment that takes place anywhere in the world if the defendants are in the United States.

Beblawi, who served as Egypt’s prime minister from 2013 to 2014, lived in DC at the time, where he worked as an executive director of the International Monetary Fund. He quit the IMF and left the United States in October.

On June 24, the Egyptian Embassy in Washington DC sent a letter to the State Department arguing that Beblawi is entitled to diplomatic immunity both because of his former position as prime minister and as a diplomat representing Egypt at the IMF. Less than a month later, on July 17, Beblawi’s attorneys attached a certification of immunity issued by the State Department as part of a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The lawsuit appears to have provoked retaliatory measures from Egyptian authorities. Two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, five of Soltan’s relatives were arrested by security forces and imprisoned for several months before being released. On the same day as the arrest of his cousins, unidentified security forces visited his father in Wadi Natrun Prison, where he has been serving a life sentence, and interrogated him about several members of Soltan’s family, according to a statement filed by Soltan to the court. The next morning the authorities moved him to an undisclosed location, Soltan said. His whereabouts remain unknown.

In December, the court issued an order inviting the US government to submit a declaration taking a formal position on the issue, giving January 22 as the deadline. President Biden took office on January 20 and his administration asked the court for an extension on the deadline in order to review the case.

Many had hoped the Biden administration would mark a turning point in US-Egypt relations. Biden himself referenced the arrest of Soltan’s relatives in a tweet, writing, “Arresting, torturing, and exiling activists like … Mohamed Soltan or threatening their families is unacceptable. No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator.’”

However, the declaration made by Biden’s Justice Department on April 1 says that the State Department’s certification of Beblawi’s diplomatic status is “conclusive.” The statement also says that disregarding the certification of Beblawi’s diplomatic status “would seriously damage U.S. foreign policy interests.”

In a statement posted online, Soltan blasted the Biden administration’s move to reaffirm Beblawi’s diplomatic status. “I am deeply disappointed with the State Department’s attempt to immunize a torturer with a history of orchestrating mass scale human rights violations. The United States could and should have opposed immunity rather than kowtowing to diplomatic pressure and legal technicalities to protect this man,” he wrote. “This attempt to insulate a torturer from accountability in US courts is a blank check to Egypt’s dictator and wholly antithetical to the Biden administration’s state commitments to foreign policy that is centered on human rights.”