This adjective is mainly used in a legal context. An extraterritorial law is a law valid outside the borders of a nation: “Under extraterritorial laws, the suspect has been arrested in Canada and returned to the United States.” In contrast, extraterritorial rights are held by diplomats who are not subject to the laws in which they temporarily live: “She never gets tickets because of her extraterritorial privileges.” Extra- means “outside”, and territorial comes from a Latin word meaning “domain”. One of the classic cases that led to the emergence of the doctrine of extraterritoriality is that of a foreign ruler visiting a friendly country. It was recognized that no local jurisdiction, whether criminal or civil, could be exercised over the sovereign. The rule was later extended to Republican heads of state. It seems generally accepted that a diplomatic representative during his term of office is totally exempt from the criminal and civil jurisdiction of the State in which he is accredited. Under the Vienna Convention, this immunity extends to both the diplomat`s family and its staff. The mission and the living quarters of diplomatic agents are protected not only from prosecution by creditors, but also from entry by police and other law enforcement officials. Whether and under what conditions they can be used to grant asylum to foreigners is controversial. An Inter-American Convention (1954) punishes diplomatic asylum for political offenders and refugees.

Before the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, which ended the First Opium War, foreign merchants were not satisfied with the state of the Qing legal system. British merchants were suspicious of what they saw as a tendency in the Qing legal system to impose collective responsibility; they were also angry at the Qing practice of imposing the death penalty for accidental homicide. [17] After the Lady Hughes affair – a controversial 1784 case in which a British gunner was executed for killing two Chinese subjects – East India Company officials generally kept the British away before Qing officials could respond. [17] “It would certainly compromise the principle of embassy extraterritoriality,” Stonehenge said. By far the most important of the ports founded after 1842 was Shanghai, where the vague extraterritoriality provisions of the various treaties were applied in the most sophisticated manner. The two main courts that tried extraterritorial cases were the Shanghai Mixed Court and the British Supreme Court for China. [29] Similar courts have been established for states parties, e.g. the US Court of Justice for China.

[30] They had jurisdiction over concessions, which officially remained under Qing sovereignty. [31] First, Chinese who had committed crimes in the British zone, for example, were transferred to Chinese authorities. [32] Today, extraterritoriality can take various forms. The best-known examples are diplomatic extraterritoriality, in which diplomats and their property operate not according to the laws of their host country, but according to the laws of the diplomatic nation. During the 13th and 14th centuries. In the nineteenth century, the Italian maritime republics of Genoa, Venice and Pisa benefited from extraterritoriality for their merchants, active in certain districts (Pera and Galata) of the Byzantine capital Constantinople as well as in Egypt and the Berber states. [6] The Sino-British Treaty of Tientsin of 1858, which ended the Second Opium War, extended the rights of Western visitors. They were allowed to enter inside China after passport control. However, extraterritorial rights have not been extended outside the ports covered by the treaty. [24] Similar rights were granted to interested Western powers on the basis of the most-favoured-nation clause: all privileges granted by the Qing Empire to one power were automatically granted to others.

In 1868, during the renegotiation of the Tientsin Treaties, British merchants loudly demanded that travel restrictions within the Chinese be lifted. The Qing position was firmly rejected unless extraterritoriality was also abolished. No compromise was found; and the Qing government succeeded in preventing foreigners from visiting China`s interior with extraterritorial privileges. [25] Extraterritoriality, also known as extraterritoriality or diplomatic immunity in international law, enjoyed by the immunities enjoyed by foreign states or international organizations and their official representatives from the jurisdiction of the country in which they reside. Extraterritoriality extends to foreign states or international organizations as entities and their leaders, legations, troops in transit, warships, mission rooms and other assets. It exempts them, when they are in the territory of a foreign sovereign, from local prosecution, police interference and other coercive measures. The term comes from the fiction that these persons or things are considered not to be in the territory of the sovereign in which they actually reside. This doctrine was founded by the French jurist Pierre Ayraut (1536-1601) and was widely disseminated by classical authors of international law such as Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694). The word extraterritoriality or its foreign equivalent was not used until the end of the 18th century. It gained a place in the legal vocabulary through its use, if not its creation, by Georg Friedrich von Martens (1756-1821), whose treatise on international law, published in 1788, gained international fame and was quickly translated into several languages, including English.

The creation of extraterritoriality for States Parties “was not introduced ex novo in East Asia, but was based on a long-standing legal edifice”. [16] Competence in Qing China, with different treatment of Han and Manchu subjects, was determined not by geography but by the identity of the subjects. [16] For example, the Manchu ruling elite had legal privileges that placed it outside the jurisdiction of local administrators of Chinese origin. [7] A more formal declaration of extraterritoriality was made in 1843 in the Bogue Amendment, which stated that “the British should be punished under English law, and the Chinese should be tried and punished according to their own laws.” [20] These provisions applied only to treaty ports, as foreigners were denied entry into China. [21] Extraterritorial rights were not limited to Western nations. Under the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tientsin of 1871, Japan and China granted each other extraterritorial rights. [26] China itself has imposed reciprocal extraterritorial rights on its own citizens in Korea from Joseon. [27] [26] In 1895, however, under the Treaty of Shimonoseki after the First Sino-Japanese War, China renounced its extraterritorial rights to Japan without reciprocity.

[28] In 1921, at the Arms Control Conference in Washington, an international treaty called the Nine-Power Treaty was signed, which expressed the willingness of the parties to end extraterritoriality in China once China had established a satisfactory legal system. [38] [39] As a result, a commission was established in 1926 to issue a detailed report containing its findings and recommendations for the Chinese legal system. [40] In 1929, the nationalist government announced its goal of ending extraterritoriality. Negotiations with Britain, the main holder of these rights, are progressing slowly. They ended with the Japanese invasion of 1937, when Japan captured Shanghai and major treaty ports where extraterritoriality was in operation. [43] When Britain and the United States entered the war against Japan in late 1941, they became official allies of China, making the end of extraterritoriality an urgent goal. The U.S. has focused on protecting its immigration restrictions. Britain sought and failed to obtain guarantees for the freedom of its trade. Both the United States and Britain renounced extraterritorial rights in 1943 with new treaties: the Sino-American Treaty on the Surrender of Extraterritorial Rights in China and the Sino-British Treaty on the Surrender of Extraterritorial Rights in China. military.

This is regulated by a status of forces. [12] [13] The legacy of this judicial review continues to this day.