CAN THE UNITED STATES FIND AN EXCEPTION TO HEAD-OF-STATE IMMUNITY FOR NATIONAL LEADERS, AND INDICT, DETAIN AND TRY THE FIVE EASTERN CARIBBEAN LEADERS OF CBI STATES?

In the aftermath of the action taken by the Government of the United States to capture the sitting President of Venezuela, and bring him to New York to stand trial in U.S. District Court, we have been repeatedly presented with an issue of great public importance to the citizens of the Eastern Caribbean states: Whether the law provides an exception to the Head-of-State Immunity Doctrine, to allow the United States to indict and try, on criminal charges, any or all of the five Prime Ministers of the five Eastern Caribbean states that sell economic citizenships, also known as Citizenship by Investment or CBI/CIP. The Five EC states are Saint Kitts & Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Saint Lucia,  and Grenada. 

This an extremely complex legal issue, and it deserves an objective analysis, involving both explicit and implicit waivers of immunity. Of course, the legal argument supporting the Nicolas Maduro case can be disposed of easily; Maduro's status as a duly elected leader of Venezuela was bogus, as he conclusively lost the presidential election in 2024, to Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, who received twice the number of votes, but Maduro, fraudulently claiming 51% of the votes cast, illegally claimed victory. Inasmuch as the United States never accepted him as sitting president, his capture and removal were not subject to Head-of-State immunity. There is no dispute in that matter.

However, when you shift to the leaders of the five EC CBI-issuing states, the issues become far more complicated. The central reason that America wants these five Labour Party, left-leaning pro-China and pro-Cuba leaders out of power is that their national policies, led by their massive sales of CBI passports to Chinese nationals, have become a Clear and Present Danger to the National Security of the United States. Unfortunately, that in and of itself is not an exception recognized under the decisional case.

So we look to legal authorities for guidance; perhaps the leaders and most recent law review article on the subject, HEAD OF STATE AND FOREIGN OFFICIAL IMMUNITY AFTER SAMANTAR: A SUGGESTED APPROACH, 34 Fordham Intl. Law J. (2011),which takes us to the United States Supreme Court case of  Samatar vs. Yousuf, 560 U.S. 305 (2010), holding (1) The Court must look to the Common Law, not the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act for a solution, and (2) The position of the Department of State on the subject must be given great weight.

What about the grounds stated in support of the American Maduro capture, unlawful holder of elected office? In truth and in fact, the National Elections conducted in the Eastern Caribbean cannot be declared to be free and fair. They are marred by widespread and organized voter fraud, whether by cash payments made in advance to voters to guide their choice, the promise of other consideration, such as employment in a seriously dysfunctional economy, airfare and other gifts paid to impoverished and unemployed individuals, and several other types of voter fraud, all of which result in a skewed result in favor of what amounts to a one-party, non-democratic state. Could the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, determine that these five prime ministers are not lawfully in office? Most certainly.

Alternatively, One of the grounds cited in the case against General Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator, was the fact that his illegal activities, designed to amass great wealth through drug trafficking, private pursuit of personal enrichment, all linked to the charges filed against him, led the Executive Branch to deny him immunity. The massive fraud, money laundering and corruption of the five Eastern Caribbean Prime Ministers, which are part of what would be the charged misconduct in their indictments, qualify for a similar interpretation by the Secretary of State. 

Therefore, we find that the United States has sufficient legal authority to bring the appropriate criminal charges against these five sitting Caribbean leaders, and given the increasing National Security risks to America that they represent, there should be no delay in the Trump Administration filing indictments forthwith, taking them into custody, and prosecuting them; let it be done.