This is a guest post by Jason Zarin, a senior legal reference librarian at the Law Library of Congress. He previously authored President Biden Nominates Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court, Bite-Sized Legal Research Tutorial: Navigating the Library of Congress Catalog, Bite-Sized Legal Research Tutorial: Military Legal Resources, and 200th Anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s Address to Congress.
A new report on the protective services provided for government officials in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United Kingdom is now available on the Law Library of Congress’s website. The report discusses the applicable laws and regulations, and the government, police, and military agencies responsible for protecting high-ranking government officials and visiting foreign dignitaries in these jurisdictions.
Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom assign primary security responsibility to a specialized unit within their civilian national police force. Brazil and South Korea entrust security responsibilities to a separate agency, which supervises specialized units of the military and police. France, Mexico, and Israel allocate security responsibilities among several agencies, including military units. In the United States, responsibilities for the protection of federal government officials, visiting foreign dignitaries, and federal buildings are divided among several agencies falling within all three branches of the federal government.
The report is an addition to the Law Library’s Legal Reports (Publications of the Law Library of Congress) collection, which includes over 4,000 historical and contemporary legal reports covering a variety of jurisdictions, researched and written by foreign law specialists with expertise in each area. To receive alerts when new reports are published, you can subscribe to email updates and the RSS feed for Law Library Reports (click the “subscribe” button on the Law Library’s website). The Law Library also regularly publishes articles related to government national security in the Global Legal Monitor.
