El Salvador has informed the United Nations that it holds no legal responsibility for the more than 200 Venezuelan men whom President Donald Trump ordered to be sent to its maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison earlier this year…
Lying aside, this is setting up a really weird question regarding sovereignty. It represents just another way that modern conceptions of sovereignty are becoming less and less territorially bound.
Another example, which also sheds light on why this is such a strange claim from El Salvador, would be the enforcement of laws in border zones. Under older conceptions of sovereignty US agents can enforce US law on US soil, and the same was true for its neighbors. However, more recently the law changed such that we have bilateral agreements with our neighbors that allow their agents to enforce our law on our soil, and vice versa, within 100 miles of the border. From the classic conception of sovereignty this makes no sense, other than that the nation’s law is still territorially bound.
The case here with El Salvador is even more interesting. El Salvador is saying these men are locked up under US law in CECOT, and that they are the responsibility of the US. Which means that now the law of the US is not territorially bound, and is being implemented in El Salvador over these men. It’s hard to convey to someone that hasn’t studied sovereignty academically just how absolutely bonkers that is.
For a similar but contrasting situation, think of immigration. If a country wants to remove migrants it doesnt tell the country they came from to come in and get them. Removal is a legal process carried out by the state, under its law, as an exercise of sovereign control over its specific territory. Asking agents of the other country’s government, who have no legal jurisdiction to do anything, to come and get migrants would make no sense.
El Salvador here is basically ceding their sovereign control over these specific people despite the fact that they are obviously in El Salvador, and therefore are subject to Salvadoran sovereignty. This isnt something that any country has ever done, except with regards to very specific people like ambassadors, or very specific spaces like embassies or military bases
If they’re under the justification of the US does that mean that they are entitled to the same rights and protections as prisoners still held in the US? Prisoners in the US have a right to be protected from physical and sexual violence, to medical care, they have limited first amendment rights and a right to communicate with their families in most circumstances. Prison overcrowding has been ruled to violate prisoners 8th amendment rights multiple times.
This was already argued in a case from the US government against Microsoft. The US government argued that because Microsoft is an American company it’s had the obligation to gave access to the servers in Ireland to the US government. At the end the scotus ruled in favor of Microsoft, but you can bet the US is going to keep trying to police the world.
Edit: missed to add that the servers where in Ireland.
This is straight out of the Curtis Yarvin New Right playbook, degrading national sovereignty and increasing control of your citizens beyond borders based on identity.
Is that guy a pedo, too?
Yep
USA policing the world 3.0.