The women's awakening whose buds are becoming plain today in Lebanon, and which has grown and come of age in other countries, is well worthy of drawing research toward the treatment of certain questions that concern woman — not only as regards the formation of the individual family cell, but as regards sharing in nourishing the interplay among the cells of human society at large; I mean woman's relation to public life, both political and diplomatic.
A glance at the Covenant of the League of Nations and a glance at the Charter of the United Nations prove that the civilized nations cannot deny woman her right to develop international bonds and to consolidate relations among states. In the first covenant as in the second there is an affirmation that the tasks of the international institutions and the work entrusted to their various departments may be assigned to woman; in this there is an equality between the rights and duties of woman and the rights and duties of man, and
a resounding acknowledgment of the capacities woman displays, capacities that rival those of man. Likewise the marked evolution in the laws of the nations makes clear woman's living part in helping to build the edifice of human society at large, and attests the solidity of the bricks she contributes to this international structure. No wonder, then, that woman has cast off the cloak of her seclusion; nor is it strange that she has begun to share with man in representing her country — representing it truly — in foreign lands. Political history offers more than one witness that the delegation of women to undertake such representation has its virtues and merits, thanks to the sagacity and suppleness woman enjoys in conducting the affairs of diplomatic relations and in raising the standing of the country to which she belongs.
Hence the idea of diplomatic immunity, and the extent to which woman may benefit by it, takes on a color that grows brighter with the days and draws inquiry
Dr. Ikram al-Saghir combined Anglo-Saxon and Latin schooling at the American School for Girls and the French institutes. After she obtained the licence from the French Faculty of Law, the Ministry of National Education delegated her to specialize in education for two years in Paris, where she pursued her legal studies at the same time and specialized in international law. In July 1950 she obtained the doctorate from the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris; the subject of her thesis was "The International Protection of Literary, Artistic, and Scientific Works." Upon her return to Lebanon she transferred from the cadre of the Ministry of National Education to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants.
to it. And the laws of the world are earnestly engaged in treating the consequences that follow from the recognition of that immunity and from the broadening scope of its conceptions.
What is meant by diplomatic immunity: to define immunity we must begin by saying that the courts in a state refrain from hearing certain suits for want of capacity, competence, or jurisdiction, or by reason of a contingent circumstance attaching to the person of the defendant and bearing no relation to the kind of suit, its venue, or its substance. This contingent circumstance is what has come by common consent to be called immunity. Since this immunity is of several kinds — meaning that it covers not only natural persons but extends also to juridical persons, wrapping the state itself under its wing and protecting certain entrusted institutions, which are many in our present day — and since, consequently, an inquiry into all the kinds of immunity would require a broader field, I have preferred in this article of mine to confine myself to
treating one portion of it, and to take up in particular the study of the immunity that woman may enjoy.
The origin of immunity goes back to certain principles laid down by public international law, and in particular to traditions and customs; its justification may also be found in the treaties concluded by certain states.
As for the rationale of this immunity and its foundation, the jurists have tried to find it in the very idea of state sovereignty. Ambassadors, as the Dutchman Bynkershoek and Grotius say, are independent vis-à-vis the authority to which they are accredited; were we to admit that they must submit to the judgments of the courts of the country to which they are delegated, there would be lost to them that sovereignty to which we know states cling fiercely, not permitting an inch of it to be forfeited. Montesquieu said in this connection that "in the mouths of ambassadors speaks he who sent them," and in their words and deeds are his words and his acts. Hence states must treat ambassadors and ambassadresses as they would treat him.