Biden administration seeks delay over Prince Mohammed immunity decision

The Biden administration is seeking a 45-day delay in a court proceeding in which it has been asked by a US judge whether it believes Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be granted sovereign immunity in a case involving the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Representatives from the US justice department said in a legal notice filed on Friday that the department was seeking the extension after Saudi Arabia announced in a press release last week that Prince Mohammed had been named prime minister.

Critics of the Saudi government said they believed the new designation was a manoeuvre designed to try to establish sovereign immunity protection for the 37-year-old prince, who is facing a civil case in the US for his alleged role in the murder of Khashoggi.

The case has put the Biden administration in a legal and diplomatic bind.

But Biden has largely abandoned that pledge in favour of pursuing other political and foreign policy objectives.

In a trip to Jeddah this summer, the president fist-bumped the crown prince even after his own administration released a declassified intelligence briefing last year that concluded Prince Mohammed had likely ordered the Khashoggi killing.

Prince Mohammed has said he has taken responsibility for the murder but that he did not order the killing.

Human-rights lawyers have also argued against giving sovereign immunity protection precedence over other principles human rights principles.

Sarah Leah Whitson, a lawyer and executive director of Dawn said the best thing the US government could do would be to refuse to weigh in on the matter. Any such decision would likely be seen as a sign to the court that the administration did not believe it had an interest in the case.

Experts have also cautioned that much more is at stake for Prince Mohammed than the civil case in Washington. If a US judge were to determine that the crown prince should be granted sovereign immunity, it would likely assure the crown prince that he was no longer facing legal threats or the threat of possible arrest when he travels outside the kingdom.

The decision in the first instance will be made by Judge John Bates, who was appointed to the bench in 2001 by then-president, George W Bush.

Bates has previously received media attention as a Republican-appointed federal judge who ruled against the Trump administration in 2018 after the White House sought to end an Obama-era programme known as Daca, which was designed to protect immigrants who arrived in the US as children.