811.04551/20

The Chargé in France (Whitehouse) to the Secretary of State

No. 6233

Sir: I have the honor to refer to the Department’s Instruction No. 1591 dated July 2, 1925 and to subsequent correspondence regarding the desirability of concluding with the French Government a convention providing for the execution of letters rogatory in civil cases.

There is now transmitted herewith a copy and translation of a communication from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs dated March 31, 192642 in which it is stated that the Foreign Office will undertake to execute letters rogatory in the usual manner. In the note the Foreign Office suggests that letters be forwarded to this Embassy for transmission to the French Government in the usual way.

M. Pillaut, who previously undertook to compose a draft of a convention along the lines suggested by the Department, has informed me that it is considered that the convention proposed by the Department could not be effected without recourse to legislation. Both he and M. Vieilleville [Viefville] stated that in a case involving an official of a foreign government, the French Government could not undertake to execute letters rogatory because of a certain political aspect, which, although perhaps not directly apparent in the proceedings or in the possible outcome of subsequent investigations, was nevertheless indirectly extant and might open up a field of negotiations with other countries, the scope of which could not be foreseen.

It appears that an attempt to execute further letters rogatory in a case now pending before the Federal courts might obtain only the negative result of a refusal to testify such as was experienced by an agent sent from the United States last September to take the testimony of two witnesses in France. M. Vieilleville [Viefville] stated that no general convention could be drawn up that could have any hope of forcing witnesses to testify in civil cases if they chose to refuse. He suggested, however, that American citizens might be summoned before an American consular officer and questioned directly, whereupon, if American law so permitted, their refusal to testify might be made the grounds for a charge of refusal to recognize the authority of the United States Government. He suggested that if the witnesses in question were made the subject of a warrant for arrest issued by the competent authorities in the United States for complicity in a crime or for other extraditable offense, extradition as in a criminal case, might be accomplished without reference to any possible political consideration involved.

I have [etc.]

Sheldon Whitehouse
  1. Not printed.