Further Thoughts: It is Indeed Legal for a U.S. Court Hold Argentina in Contempt

I am fascinated by the ongoing Argentina debt litigation saga (and not just because it looks more and more like a train wreck), but because it is forcing U.S. courts to burrow into even fuzzier nooks and crannies of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to figure out what exactly US litigants can do when suing an intransigent foreign sovereign like Argentina.  I promised I would revisit the question of whether the U.S. judge’s contempt order against Argentina on Monday was legal, and here is my further (although still somewhat brief) analysis.

1) It is legal and consistent with U.S. domestic law for a U.S. court to issue contempt sanctions against a foreign sovereign.  

The most recent authority for this proposition is the quite recent 2011 opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, F.G. Hemisphere Associates v. Congo.   In that case, the D.C. Circuit rejected the argument by Congo (and the U.S. Government) that contempt sanctions due to Congo’s refusal to comply with discovery orders would violate the FSIA.  Following the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Autotech Techs. v. Integral Research & Dev., 499 F.3d 737, 744 (7th Cir.2007), the Court held that nothing in the text or the legislative history of the FSIA suggested that there was any limitation on the inherent judicial power to issue contempt sanctions. It also rejected contrary precedent from the U.S. Court of Appeals from the Fifth Circuit in Af-Cap, Inc. v. Republic of Congo, 462 F.3d 417 (5th Cir. 2006).

I think the DC and Seventh Circuits are right that nothing in the text or the legislative history of the FSIA bars a judicial contempt order against a sovereign.

2. There is some authority for the proposition that judicial contempt orders against foreign sovereigns are not accepted under international law, but there is reason to question whether there is international consensus supporting this authority.

Argentina can, and did, rightly point to Article 24 of the Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and their Property as authority against the legality of contempt sanctions against sovereigns.

Article 24
Privileges and immunities during court proceedings
1. Any failure or refusal by a State to comply with an order of a court of
another State enjoining it to perform or refrain from performing a specific act
or to produce any document or disclose any other information for the purposes
of a proceeding shall entail no consequences other than those which may result
from such conduct in relation to the merits of the case. In particular, no fine or
penalty shall be imposed on the State by reason of such failure or refusal.

I think that the language of this provision seems to pretty clearly cover the situation in the Argentina debt case.  But I am less sure that Argentina is correct to call Article 24 of the Convention a rule of customary international law.

U.S. briefs citing Article 24 have been careful to call this rule an “international norm or practice” rather than a rule of international law.  There are good reasons to be circumspect on this point. After all, the Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities has NOT come into force, and has NOT even been signed by either Argentina or the United States, and has only been ratified by 14 other countries.  Moreover, the particular rule in Article 24 banning all court contempt-like orders is much broader than the domestic laws of states like the U.S. (see above) and even those agreed to by European states in the European Convention on State Immunity.  Article 17 of the European Convention is focused only on contempt orders for failure to produce documents, not all contempt orders for any act by the foreign sovereign.

So in conclusion, I am very confident that U.S. domestic law does NOT preclude a contempt order of any kind against a foreign sovereign.  I am somewhat confident that there is no clear consensus under international law that all contempt orders (even those unrelated to discovery) are prohibited, although I do think Argentina has a stronger case on this front.  However, in U.S. law, a rule of customary international law cannot override a federal statute, especially when the international acceptance of that rule remains uncertain.

As a practical matter, I do wonder if this whole contempt kerfuffle is just symbolic. The contempt order adds to Argentina’s obligations to pay, but it doesn’t really make it any easier for the creditors to collect since Argentina’s non-commercial assets in the U.S. remains immune from collection. While Argentina’s government may be outraged, this contempt order doesn’t really change the overall dynamic of this case, which remains a standoff that neither side is winning.