Precedent for a country refusing a particular ambassador?

Factual Questions
1

British Ambassador to the US Kim Darroch sent the UK Foreign Office classified assessments of Donald Trump. These assessments, which were unflattering to Trump, were recently leaked. Trump announced that the US would refuse to deal with Darroch in the future. (And Darroch just resigned.)

Brits are struggling to recall a precedent for this situation in UK-US relations. Today’s Guardian says that according to Simon McDonald, head of the Foreign Office, “the last time there was a problem like this was in 1856, when the Americans objected to the British ambassador recruiting Americans to fight in the Crimean War.”

Is there any comparable precedent for any country refusing a particular person as ambassador from another country?

2

Sure. See Wikipedia’s entry on people declared persona non grata. Not all of the people listed there were ambassadors, but over a dozen were.

3

It isn’t common, but it happens. But an ambassador resigning due to political circumstances generally is completely different than a country refusing one’s credentials.

Article 4 of the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic relations makes clear that a country sending an ambassador cannot “force” that person into the receiving country:

4

I remember being overseas once when such an incident happened. If I recall correctly, they didn’t actually do anything scandalous, and their dubious past/ethics had not stood in their way to getting the position in their own country, (Pakistan, maybe?) the host country however, (Australia, maybe?), declines them entry. Basically sending them back, in a ‘Try again!’, sort of fashion.

(Apologies if I’ve got the nations wrong it was over a decade ago now! )

5

The Vatican has done this several times. It was reported the Obama administration had three potential ambassadors rejected (one of them was Caroline Kennedy). France got the silent treatment over its choice of a gay man a few years ago. There aren’t as many good sources for this, but supposedly a proposed ambassador from Lebanon was rejected for being a freemason.

6

Couple of ways this could play out:

  1. A particular person is mooted as ambassador. The host nation indicates that the appointment would be problematic, so the appointment is not made.

  2. A particular person is appointed as ambassador, but the host nation refuses to accept their credentials. Don’t know how often this happens, if ever. I have a vague recollection, which could be quite wrong, that some time before World War I Austria refused to accept the credentials of a new US ambassador, who was Jewish, and indicated that the US should appoint an ambassador who wasn’t Jewish. The US refused and the post was left vacant.

  3. An ambassador is appointed and accepted, but at a subsequent point is declared persona non grata. This is nearly always over an issue between the two countries concerned, rather than about the characteristics or actions of the ambassador personally.

  4. An ambassador is appointed and accepted but, although he remains accredited, the host nation refuses to deal with him because a high official of the host nation gets in a snit about a view the ambassador took in his reports to his own government. This is unbelievably childish, petty and incoherent and only an overgrown toddler would engage in behaviour like this, so it’s fairly rare.

7

There are plenty of precedents for a host government to make/declare an ambassador unwelcome, formally or informally, personally or politically. What’s unprecedented in this case is that it’s happened with a key ally, as a result of a more or less overt shabby political manoeuvre in the UK.

I wonder how long it will take Trump’s people to realise that whoever in the UK hopes to benefit from this was playing on Trump’s weaknesses, and what the implications of that might be.