Extraterritoriality is the state of being exempted from the jurisdiction of local law, usually as the result of diplomatic negotiations.
Historically, this primarily applied to individuals, as jurisdiction was usually claimed on peoples rather than on lands. Extraterritoriality can also be applied to physical places, such as foreign embassies, military bases of foreign countries, or offices of the United Nations. The three most common cases recognized today internationally relate to the persons and belongings of foreign heads of state, the persons and belongings of ambassadors and other diplomats, and ships in international waters.Various capitulations were a series of treaties between the Sublime Porte and Western nations, from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. The legal impenetrability of the Ottoman legal code created during the Tanzimat era began to weaken continuously through the spread of European empires and the prevalence of legal positivism.
The laws and regulations created for Ottoman subjects to abide by often did not apply to European nationals conducting business and trade in the provinces of the empire, and thus various capitulations were brought into effect with respect to many foreign powers. The various overlapping governmental laws led to legal pluralism in which jurisdiction often was left up to the great powers to institute and organize their own legal structures to represent their citizens abroad.
The capitulations ceased to have effect in Turkey in 1923, by virtue of the Treaty of Lausanne, and in Egypt they were abolished by the Montreux Convention in 1949.
See also: Portents of empire in Britain's Ottoman extraterritorial jurisdiction
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/jcls/vol4/iss2/6
Abstract
In the nineteenth century, justice in the Ottoman Empire appeared to international jurists deeply corrupted and far from the Western model. European consular jurisdictions, as in the past, solved this embarrassment in the prevalent and private interest of Western States in order to control the Mediterranean area. This perpetrated abjuration to recognize an autonomous and sovereign Ottoman administration of justice in civil or criminal cases in which foreigners were involved continued, in spite of the fact that the Porte provided excellent examples of intersection, reception and appropriation of foreign models to construct a new legal system, and to transform society. This process of “westernization” or “modernization” formally started in 1839, by the Hatt-i Hümayün of Gülkhâne. In order to halt the contradictions derived from the coexistence of the last (French and English) treaties of commerce of 1838 and their confirmation of privileges and consular jurisdiction with the driven effort of Ottoman juridical reforms of Tanzîmât period, in 1840 in both Turkey and Egypt, mixed traders councils composed of local and foreign traders were established. In 1840 the “commercial board” was born in Turkey and, in 1848, European Powers holding capitulary privileges negotiated the formal recognition of mixed tribunals (which were regulated in 1873 and formally inaugurated in 1875). This embarrassing situation was getting worse and accumulating contradictions when in 1856, at the Congress of Paris, the Ottoman Empire was “admitted to participate in the advantages of European Public Law and system” (art. 7 of the Treaty). Thanks to those words, the logical preamble of consular jurisdictions and their extraterritoriality (mitigated by the “monstrous” compromise of mixed tribunals), formally failed. There was a need to investigate and redefine the paradigmatic declensions of sovereignty in the relations between European Powers and the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century.
Extraterritoriality, Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century
Extraterritoriality - Origins of extraterritoriality
While the practice and claims of extraterritoriality originated in antiquity, most notably in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, it was during the Middle Ages that its modern principles were established. As early as the twelfth century, Italian cities such as Genoa, Venice, and Pisa secured protection for their merchants in Egypt, Constantinople, and the Barbary States of North Africa. In northern Europe, the Hanseatic League obtained jurisdictional rights for its merchants within its trading region. During the next three centuries, Turkey granted so-called capitulary rights to Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and the United States.
... During antiquity, legal rights and obligations in Egypt, Greece, and Rome were deemed an integral part of membership in the community and could never be extended to aliens—the "strangers within the gates." However, merchants and traders traveling to distant lands were often permitted to reside and to establish trade factories, to manage their own affairs, to build temples, and to live according to their own customs, ceremonies, and rites.
By the end of the eighteenth century, a significant change had occurred in the concept of extraterritoriality. Before the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War and established the basis for the modern European system of nation-states, the notion of territorial sovereignty had not taken definite and concrete form. Sovereignty was generally viewed as personal rather than territorial, and it was related to the theory of the personalization of laws: that a foreigner carried his own law wherever he went. It was the ruler's duty to protect those who swore personal allegiance to him.
... The recognition of territorial sovereignty in the West had a profound impact on the Ottoman Empire and in the Orient, where the principle that law was personal rather than territorial persisted for a long period of time. It affected, in particular, the relationships between Christian Europe and the Islamic and Asian countries, which were viewed as outside the pale of "civilization." Since these states were considered beyond the sphere of international law, it was held that European subjects and citizens had to be protected from the barbarities of "uncivilized" peoples, at least until the latter conformed to the standards of law and justice that Europeans considered just and equitable. ... foreigners ... believed in the superiority of their own virtues and civilization.
From the earliest times, foreign ambassadors, government officials, and diplomatic representatives were granted a special status and exemption from local jurisdiction. ...The special rights and immunities involved were specifically defined in treaties, and were not reciprocal. ... The imposition of extraterritoriality clearly came to represent the superiority of Western Christian countries over inferior, backward, and "uncivilized" peoples. In this sense, modern extraterritoriality served not only as a protective shield but also as an instrument to further penetration and imperialistic expansion.
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