How to escape an embassy

We’ve all seen the scenes: whether it’s Homer at the embassy gates in Australia, or Matt Damon at the consulate in Zurich, a chiselled marine then takes a break from his protein shake and bicep curls to yell something like “this is US soil!”

If we were sitting next to you on the couch, we would’ve hit pause then purred those sweet words “well actually”, before diplo-splaining that embassies aren’t home soil.

Rather, they’re inviolable under international law — ie, local authorities can’t enter without permission. Firefighters generally can’t even burst through to douse flames!

Why? It’s a kind of global truce (via Vienna Conventions) to ensure everyone’s diplomats can do their jobs without fear of interference from the host country.

But as you can imagine, that kind of tag safe-zone has meant not just pivotal plot points for Lethal Weapon 2, but also quite the legal loophole as we’ve seen in Peru this week.

Peru just severed its ties with Mexico after Mexico’s local embassy granted asylum to Peru’s former PM (Betssy Chávez) — she was out on bail while fighting charges that she helped former president Pedro Castillo attempt his alleged ‘self-coup’ in 2022 (dissolving other branches of government to accumulate power). 

So with Mexico and Peru now in a stand-off, we thought we’d take a closer look at how this kind of impasse typically plays out, starting with…

1. Negotiated exile or release 

This is what happens when a government’s costs outweigh any benefits.

Take the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur. It quickly became a diplomatic crisis, not just because Kim was casually assassinating rivals in a major international airport, but because three of the North Korean nationals named as suspects (including a ✌️diplomat✌️ and airline employee) ended up fleeing to North Korea’s local embassy. They were spies for Pyongyang’s ministry of state security.

How’d they escape? Malaysia eventually relented after North Korea conveniently detained nine random Malaysians elsewhere. Classic hostage diplomacy, and it worked, though it’s really only a viable option for pariah states like North Korea and Iran.

2. Rescue mission or escape

Earlier this year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “precise operation” had rescued five Venezuelan opposition figures from the Argentine embassy in Caracas where they’d been hiding for over a year from local dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The details are still shrouded in mystery, though Italian outlets have referred to Rome possibly playing a role. This might’ve involved (say) exfiltrating the hostages in the back of an Italian diplomatic vehicle making a humanitarian visit — that’s likely how a convicted Ecuadorian ex-minister escaped the Argentine embassy in Quito in 2023, for example.

But that would’ve been tricky here given the sheer scale of Maduro’s siege around the embassy: spooks, soldiers, drones, power cuts, and even neighbouring homes seized!

The Italian reference, however, does remind us of the ✌️rescue✌️ of two hostages from Somali pirates back in 2012. Later leaks suggested Italy’s intelligence agency fabricated the rescue to hide the fact they just paid a ransom, which brings us to the fact that…

Maduro’s regime indeed claims there was no rescue here, but rather just a negotiated release. Though of course, Maduro wouldn’t admit failure either, would he?

3. Forceful capture 

Very rarely, you also get governments going full Kool-Aid Man through the embassy walls, like Ecuador famously did last year to arrest its former veep in Mexico’s embassy. The incident triggered world outrage (and a case at the ICJ), though Ecuador got its guy. 

But if you don’t have the stomach for that, then your only other remaining option is…

4. Indefinite stay

Julian Assange’s seven year stint in Ecuador’s London embassy is the most famous, but there are others pulling an Assange even today: back in his home country of Australia, for example, there’s a pro-Kremlin propagandist who’s been hiding in Russia’s Sydney consulate for three years to evade a warrant for assaulting a pro-Ukrainian protester.