Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 742.0

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Cite as: 524 U. S. 666 (1998)

697

Opinion of the Court

mitigate the burdens that the ruling would otherwise im-
pose. Because foreign relations are speciﬁcally committed
by the Constitution to the political branches, Art. II, § 2, cl. 2,
we would not make a discretionary judgment premised on
inducing them to adopt policies in relation to other nations
without squarely confronting the propriety of grounding
judicial action on such a premise.

Second, the very assumption that a witness’s silence may
be used against him in a deportation or extradition proceed-
ing due to its civil nature, 119 F. 3d, at 136 (citing Lopez-
Mendoza, 468 U. S., at 1038–1039), raises serious questions
about the likely gain from recognizing fear of foreign prose-
cution. For if a witness claiming the privilege ended up in
a foreign jurisdiction that, for whatever reason, recognized
no privilege under its criminal law, the recognition of the
privilege in the American courts would have gained nothing
for the witness. This possibility, of course, presents a sharp
contrast with the consequences of recognizing the privilege
based on fear of domestic prosecution.
If testimony is com-
pelled, Murphy itself illustrates that domestic courts are not
even wholly dependent on immunity statutes to see that no
use will be made against the witness; the exclusionary prin-
ciple will guarantee that. See Murphy, 378 U. S., at 79.
Whatever the cost to the Government may be, the beneﬁt to
the individual is not in doubt in a domestic proceeding.

Since the likely gain to the witness fearing foreign prose-
cution is thus uncertain, the countervailing uncertainty
about the loss of testimony to the United States cannot be
dismissed as comparatively unimportant. That some testi-
mony will be lost is highly probable, since the United States
will not be able to guarantee immunity if testimony is
compelled (absent some sort of cooperative international
arrangement that we cannot assume will occur). While the
Court of Appeals is doubtless correct that the expected con-
sequences of some foreign prosecutions may be so severe
that a witness will refuse to testify no matter what, not