The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Justice has argued in federal court that employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) who joined the October 7 terror attack are immune from lawsuits.
The DOJ made the astonishing argument in a lawsuit filed in June by relatives of victims of the attack, based on reports and UNRWA’s own admission that some of the refugee agency’s employees supported or backed Hamas.
UNRWA admitted that nine of its employees may have participated in the attack; one UNRWA employee took the body of a murdered Israeli back to Gaza. The agency has also been accused of indoctrinating Palestinians generally.
However, UNRWA told the federal court in the Southern District of New York that its employees enjoy immunity under the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations of 1946, and that the United Nations has not waived immunity.
The Department of Justice agreed, according to the Jewish News Syndicate:
In a filing to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, the world body claimed that “since the U.N. has not waived immunity in this instance, its subsidiary, UNRWA, continues to enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution, and the lawsuit should be dismissed,” Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Saturday night.
The Biden administration was said to have echoed the U.N.’s position on the suit filed by Oct. 7 victims, with the Department of Justice telling the court that “the plaintiff’s complaint does not present a legal basis for claiming that the United Nations waived its immunity.
“Because the U.N. has not waived immunity in this case, its subsidiary, UNRWA, retains full immunity, and the lawsuit against UNRWA should be dismissed due to lack of subject matter jurisdiction,” the Department of Justice said.
Legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich and Rabbi Mark Goldfeder argued Wednesday in the New York Post that the DOJ was not required to defend UNRWA’s immunity, and that the decision to intervene in the case was a policy choice:
[T]he United States has historically supported a broad interpretation of UN immunity — but despite significant prior misdeeds, UN agencies have never before been structurally intertwined with a US-designated terror group, or had numerous employees carry out mass atrocities.
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In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that IOIA only affords international organizations the same immunity from suit that foreign governments enjoy under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
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Under the FSIA, sovereign immunity does not extend to support for terrorism, and allows the president to designate “state sponsors” of terror that can be sued for such acts — a list that currently includes Hamas’ patron, Iran.
They conclude that the Biden-Harris administration decided not to associate UNRWA with Hamas — even though the U.S. suspended funding to UNRWA for precisely that reason. Then-President Donald Trump canceled funding for UNRWA in 2018; President Joe Biden restored funding, including for previous years, upon taking office in 2021.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
