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UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Opinion of the Court

every foreign prosecution may measure up so harshly as
against the expectable domestic consequences of contempt
for refusing to testify. We therefore must suppose that on
Balsys’s view some evidence will in fact be lost to the domes-
tic courts, and we are accordingly unable to dismiss the po-
sition of the United States in this case, that domestic law
enforcement would suffer serious consequences if fear of
foreign prosecution were recognized as sufﬁcient to invoke
the privilege.

In sum, the most we would feel able to conclude about the
net result of the beneﬁts and burdens that would follow from
Balsys’s view would be a Scotch verdict.
If, then, precedent
for the traditional view of the scope of the Clause were not
dispositive of the issue before us, if extending the scope of
the privilege were open to consideration, we still would not
ﬁnd that Balsys had shown that recognizing his claim would
be a sound resolution of the competing interests involved.

V

This is not to say that cooperative conduct between the
United States and foreign nations could not develop to a
point at which a claim could be made for recognizing fear of
foreign prosecution under the Self-Incrimination Clause as
If it could be said that the United
traditionally understood.
States and its allies had enacted substantially similar crimi-
nal codes aimed at prosecuting offenses of international char-
acter, and if it could be shown that the United States was
granting immunity from domestic prosecution for the pur-
pose of obtaining evidence to be delivered to other nations
as prosecutors of a crime common to both countries, then an
argument could be made that the Fifth Amendment should
apply based on fear of foreign prosecution simply because
that prosecution was not fairly characterized as distinctly
“foreign.” The point would be that the prosecution was as
much on behalf of the United States as of the prosecuting
nation, so that the division of labor between evidence gath-