With respect to the validity of a sentence pronounced in a foreign territory, if such sentence has been pronounced by a judge every way competent, and is the result of a trial conducted in the usual mode, according to the laws that ought to serve as a basis for the decision, and if the cause has been judged definitively, no foreign judge can admit of a second suit on the same cause, between the same persons: the sentence has the same force as the awards of arbitrators fixed on by the parties ought to have in a state of na ture.
5. The end of civil society requires that the sovereign should have a right to forbid actions hurtful to the state and its members, to award penalties for such actions, ap prehend and judge the criminals, and execute the sentence pronounced on them. These rights collectively taken, to gether with their necessary concomitants, form the crimi nal power. This power extends to every one in the ter ritory, whether subject or foreigner. So that though foreign sovereigns and their ministers may not he subject to the jurisdiction of the state, yet the sovereign is justifiable in taking such measures even against them as are necessa ry to save the state from the clangers into which their crimes would otherwise plunge it.
A sovereign can ptinish foreigners, whether they have committed a crime in his dominions, or whether, after hav ing committed it in a foreign country, they seek shelter in his dominions. In neither case is the sovereign perfectly obliged to send them for punishment to their own country, nor to the place where the crime was committed ; not even supposing they have been condemned before then. escape. According to modern custom, to send a criminal back to the place where the crime has been committed, is more frequently granted on the request of a power who offers to render the like service, than to send one from the place where the crime has been committed to his own country, or to some court of justice of his own country. This latter
is never granted except in virtue of treaty ; or if it be, the sovereign must have an extraordidary deference for the power that tnakcs the request.
6. On the other hand, the sovereign, owing the protec tion of the state to foreigners as well as to Ida subjects, is obliged to punish, with the same scrupulousness, and with the same rigour, all crimes committed against the persons and properties of foreigners living in his territories, as he would punish the same crimes if committed against the persons or properties of his own subjects. But with re spect to crimes committed out of his territories, the sove reign is not perfectly obliged to punish the criminal who seeks shelter in his dominions, nor to execute a sentence pronounced against his person or property. However, the general good seems to require that those who attack im mediately the safety of a state should not go unpunished ; and accordingly, in case of requisition, no sovereign refuses directly to take cognizance of such crimes.
7. The criminal power being confined to the territory, no act of its authority can be exercised in foreign countries without violating their rights. Consequently neither the pursuit of a criminal by armed men, nor a seizure or car rying away by force, nor the conducting of a criminal by an armed force, can take place on a foreign territory with out permission from the sovereign.
8. The right of cancelling a criminal suit, or of pardon ing the criminal, can be exercised by no sovereign beyond the limits of his territory. A prince may pardon a crime committed in his own or a foreign territory, but this pardon cannot hinder a foreign sovereign from prosecuting the same person, for the same crime, when he can seize him. The prince who first pardoned him has no means of hinder ing the effects of such prosecution, but those of interces sion ; except in cases where the manifest innocence of the accused party authorises coercive means.