Page:Türkiye Halk Bankasi A.Ş. v. United States.pdf/14

Rh sequentially (per Congress’s design), the natural inference is that §1604 operates exclusively in civil cases. Section 1330(a) spells out a universe of civil (and only civil) cases against foreign states over which district courts have jurisdiction, and §1604 then clarifies how principles of immunity operate within that limited civil universe.

We thus decline to read §1604’s grant of immunity to apply in criminal proceedings—a category of cases beyond the civil actions contemplated in §1330(a), the jurisdictional grant to which §1604 is substantively and sequentially linked. Before making that leap, we would expect to find some express textual indication regarding §1604’s purportedly broader-than-civil scope. But none exists.

Moreover, Halkbank’s interpretation of §1604 is difficult to square with its interpretation of §1605, an FSIA provision delineating exceptions to the immunity granted in §1604. Halkbank reads §1604 to confer immunity in both civil and criminal cases. But Halkbank then turns around and insists that the exceptions to that immunity specified in §1605—exceptions which, per the statute, apply “in any case”—attach exclusively in civil matters. Brief for Petitioner 43.

In other words, Halkbank sees §1330 as operating only in civil cases, §1604 in both civil and criminal cases, and §1605 only in civil cases. In Halkbank’s view, the FSIA’s scope awkwardly flip-flops from civil to civil-and-criminal back to civil again in sequential provisions. Congress did not write such a mangled statute. The better and more natural reading is that §§1330, 1604, and 1605 operate in tandem within a single universe of civil matters.

The FSIA’s remaining provisions described above—namely, those detailing elaborate procedures and remedies applicable exclusively in civil cases—strongly buttress the conclusion that §1604 “lays down a baseline principle of foreign sovereign immunity from civil actions,” and from civil actions alone. Cassirer, 596 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5)