The UN's top court today partly threw out a case brought by Equatorial Guinea against France, amid a bitter row triggered after a French court convicted the African nation's vice president of embezzlement.
In a complicated legal ruling at the International Court of Justice, judges found they lacked jurisdiction to decide whether France had broken international conventions by prosecuting Teodorin Obiang.
In the long-running, corruption case, the 48-year-old son of Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang was tried in absentia by a Paris court and given a three-year suspended sentence in October for corruption.
He was found to have embezzled 150 million euros (USD 180 million) to fund his lavish lifestyle, and was also given a suspended fine of 30 million euros for money laundering, corruption and abuse in the small central African state. Malabo had contended that under the Palermo Convention, Obiang had diplomatic immunity from any prosecution.
But the ICJ judges agreed with objections raised by France that "the court lacks jurisdiction" in that matter under the UN's convention against transnational organised crime, presiding judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf said.
However, the ICJ judges agreed they could rule on whether Obiang's six-storey mansion, on the upscale Avenue Foch in Paris, was a diplomatic mission.
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In 2012, French authorities seized the property, on one of the French capital's poshest streets, along with a fleet of luxury cars including two Bugatti Veyrons -- often dubbed the world's most expensive supercar -- and a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Police also carted away vanloads of valuables, including paintings, a usd 4.2-million clock, Michael Jackson memorabilia and fine wines worth thousands of euros per bottle.
Malabo contends the mansion in the luxury 16th arrondissement, which boasts a cinema, spa and gold-leafed covered taps, acted as its embassy in Paris, and as such was off-limits to French raids under the Vienna Convention.
The ICJ judges threw out a preliminary objection from France, and unanimously agreed that they could hear the dispute over the luxury house. "The Vienna Convention provides for the regime of inviolability of buildings which have the status of diplomatic premises," said Yusuf.
And he specified that it was not just the premises but also "their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission, that are immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution."