This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Popular accounts of diplomatic immunity tend to describe a single, absolute status: you either have it or you do not. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations actually builds a graduated structure of at least three distinct tiers, calibrated to how close a person's work sits to the core diplomatic function the doctrine exists to protect, and the differences between the tiers are not a technicality; they decide who can actually be sued or prosecuted for what. At the top sits the diplomatic agent proper, the ambassador and the accredited diplomatic staff who conduct the mission's substantive relations with the host government. Under Article 31, this tier receives complete immunity from the host state's criminal jurisdiction, with no listed exceptions at all, and near-complete immunity from civil and administrative jurisdiction, carved back only for three narrow categories: private real estate held in a personal capacity rather than on the mission's behalf, involvement in an estate as executor or heir in a purely private capacity, and professional or commercial activity carried on outside official functions, which a diplomat is not supposed to be doing in the first place. Below that sits the administrative and technical staff, the mission's own clerks, translators, and IT and communications personnel, who under Article 37 keep the same complete criminal immunity as the top tier but lose the civil and administrative protection for anything outside their official acts; a technical officer's off-duty car accident, unlike an ambassador's, can reach the host state's civil courts. At the bottom sits service staff, drivers, domestic workers, and maintenance personnel employed by the mission, whose immunity under the same article is narrower still: it covers only acts performed in the actual course of their official duties, with no blanket criminal shield at all beyond that. The practical effect of this three-tier structure is that a mission's most senior figures carry the broadest protection while its most replaceable staff carry the least, an allocation that maps immunity directly onto the diplomatic function it is meant to serve rather than treating every person who works inside an embassy as interchangeably protected. Cases that reach the public eye almost always involve the top tier, because that is where blanket criminal immunity actually applies; the graduated tiers beneath it do the quieter work of making sure the doctrine does not extend further than the function it was built to protect.