Cite as: 524 U. S. 666 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
mitigate the burdens that the ruling would otherwise impose. 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 proceeding 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 prosecution. 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 compelled, 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 principle 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 prosecution is thus uncertain, the countervailing uncertainty about the loss of testimony to the United States cannot be dismissed as comparatively unimportant. That some testimony 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 consequences of some foreign prosecutions may be so severe that a witness will refuse to testify no matter what, not
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