holding that an individual foreign official sued for conduct undertaken in his official capacity does not qualify as a “foreign state” entitled to immunity from suit 7 USCA4 Appeal: 25-2232 Doc: 41 Filed: 07/08/2026 Pg: 8 of 19 under the FSIA”
How later courts described this case
- holding that an individual foreign official sued for conduct undertaken in his official capacity does not qualify as a “foreign state” entitled to immunity from suit 7 USCA4 Appeal: 25-2232 Doc: 41 Filed: 07/08/2026 Pg: 8 of 19 under the FSIA”
- determining that 28 U.S.C. § 1603 (a)’s definition of “foreign state” does not encompass individual officials “because the types of defendants listed are all entities,” and “[a] word may be known by the company it keeps.”
- holding that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), 28 U.S.C. § 1602 et seq., and its service of process provisions do not apply to suits against foreign officials, a point which the plaintiffs readily concede
- finding that in contradistinetion to general principles of sovereign immunity, FSIA extends foreign sovereign immunity only to statutorily defined agencies and instrumentalities and not to foreign officials at all
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Alito,
concurring.
I join the opinion of the Court, although I think that the citations to legislative history are of little if any value here.
Justice Thomas, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join the Court’s opinion except for those parts relying on the legislative history of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, 28 U. S. C. §§ 1330 ,1602 et seq. In my view, the Court’s textual analysis is sufficient to resolve this case. See post this page and 327-329 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).