Standard Procedure

"...Strip searches are inherently humiliating and degrading for detainees regardless of the manner in which they are carried out and for this reason they cannot be carried out simply as a matter of routine policy."
"Police must establish reasonable and probable grounds justifying the strip search."
Canadian Supreme Court ruling, 2001

No such judicial inhibitions prevail in the United States. And in the case of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade, her diplomatic immunity as a deputy-consul general for India in New York, applied only to her professional life, not her private life, rendering her as far as New York State and its police were concerned, susceptible to the same search protocol as anyone else, according to the public prosecutor.

STRINGER/Reuters - India's Deputy Consul General in New York, Devyani Khobragade, attends a Rutgers University event at India's Consulate General in New York on June 19.

She was arrested just as she dropped one of her children off at school, and taken into custody, the result of a complaint lodged against her by an Indian national, a woman on whose behalf she had made application for a working visa, and whom she paid illegally, under New York law, under the minimum wage. Ms. Khobragade has been charged with illegality in the matter of the visa and the wage paid to her nanny.

And this is rather risible; the U.S. charging a foreign diplomat for not paying the state minimum wage to a foreign national who had, it was said, originally agreed to the arrangement. It is absurd, given the fact that service workers and other members of the working poor in the United States are so ill paid they must turn to social services and food stamps to enable themselves and their families to live decently at the poverty line.

Where in New York itself, the large financial houses were bailed out of impending bankruptcy by government treasury during the economic meltdown that reared its ugly head in 2008 through financial mismanagement and worthless mortgage papers causing the global community to fall into economic hardship. Those financial houses have rebounded and are making money hand over fist, yet pay their own workers an $11-an-hour wage as bank tellers. How to live in New York on that wage?

The yardstick used to judge a foreign diplomat was a pretty biased one. It may be indefensible that a home-care worker be paid the pittance that Ms. Khobragade was paying her children's nanny, but there are other methods of bringing attention to someone engaging in illegal and unethical behaviour other than to take someone respected among her peers for her diplomatic work, and force her to undergo a degrading, humiliating, intrusive and ultimately sexual-assault experience.

"We are looking into the intake procedures surrounding this arrest to ensure that all standard procedures were followed and that every opportunity for courtesy was extended", explained Jay Carney, President Obama's chief spokesperson in a news briefing. The extension of courtesy, imagine that. But standard procedures appear to have been followed, and so nothing more need be said nor done.

Washington is facing a furious backlash from New Delhi. Which has itself taken retaliatory steps against American diplomats posted to India, to give them a working idea of India's distaste for the miserable experience one of its diplomats was exposed to. New Delhi doesn't appear to have been mollified one iota by the expression of regret from Secretary of State John Kerry.

Congress and the U.S. president sanctioned indiscrimate domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, and the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned indiscriminate strip searching in 2012. Strange, for an administration that celebrates itself for its social action mentality, and its reliance on social civility. The Supreme Court ruled anyone arrested for any offence, no matter how minor is liable to strip searching.

Forget "reasonable suspicion", "probable cause", or "unreasonable search and seizure". In 2011 there were 3,991 recorded arrests for every 100,000 people. That would or could result in over twelve million strip searches. This is standard procedure in the United States. And when queried about the human rights abuse that such intrusive strip searches, including cavity searches, represent, the response is: "standard procedure".