Immunity

This open-access chapter treats immunity as the other half of jurisdiction: the rules that decide when a court, prosecutor, or enforcement authority that could act must nevertheless stop. Its angle is institutional and political as well as doctrinal. Immunity allocates power among states, domestic forums, international organizations, and claimants. It decides who may sit in judgment, who is shielded from process, who bears the loss when a foreign state trades or wrongs, and who is left without a practical remedy. The chapter maps state, diplomatic, organizational, and official immunities; the move from absolute to restrictive state immunity; decolonization and the state as trader; universal jurisdiction and international crimes; human-rights and civil-reparation claims; and the separate barriers of act of state, non-justiciability, and enforcement. Throughout, it asks not only what rule applies, but what distribution of authority and risk that rule produces. Published freely on thetextbookproject.org, it may be read, downloaded, cited, and assigned in courses under the Creative Commons licence stated on the cover.