Geneva Conventions and CPA asset-stripping
You have to love Britain's world-class leaders in the field of financial media. First, a couple of weeks ago, came the Economist's cover with the big title: "Wielders of Mass Deception?" super-imposed over a photo of Bush and Blair. And today comes a piece in the Financial Times reporting on a conference of international-law experts in London who concluded that US Gauleiter L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer's Order 39, which essentially allowed the global asset-stripping of most of the Iraqi economy at bargain-basement prices, might well be illegal.
The article, by Thomas Catan, reports the following regarding a discussion about Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA):
- "Is what they are doing legitimate, is it legal?" asked Juliet Blanch, a partner at the London-based international law firm Norton Rose. "Most [experts] believe that their actions are not legal", she said. "There would be no requirement for a new government to ratify their [actions]."
International law obliges occupying powers to respect laws already in force in a country "unless absolutely prevented" from doing so.
- The CPA has yet to announce what will become of pre-existing contracts, many of which are held by Russian, Chinese and French companies.
However, international law experts have said they could be enforced, raising the possibility that contracts with the ousted regime might be more enforceable than those signed with the CPA.
Is this an amazing coincidence or what?
The main existing body of international law in such matters consists of the provisions codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The government representatives who met together in Geneva then and voted their agreement to the Conventions still had vividly in mind the depradations that Germany's military occupation of most of continental Europe had wrought on the peoples and societies of the continent's non-German peoples. Maybe we should urge the US and Israel to keep those terrible precedents in mind today, too?
Long live the Geneva Conventions! They are one tiny basis of normative agreement in a frequently brutal world.
Thanks for this, Helena. On asset-stripping, I discussed this briefly with one Iraqi, who claimed that the drive for privatisation (not, though, for international asset-stripping) had come from the governing council, and in particular from exiled Iraqi groups, who had agreed prior to the war that they wanted to privatise for the sake of limiting the power of future dictators. I don't personally think the argument holds much water, and I think Washington was the power behind order 39, but it's worth mentioning.
Here (in Britain) the Lib Dems are putting some effort into the issue. There's an opinion piece about it by Shirley Williams here
Something else which has been largely missed on finances in Iraq is the formation of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, which is supposed to audit CPA activity. This follows several months of foot-dragging by the US, whose proposals for a toothless body were rejected by, I think, the IMF and world bank.
Apologies for length - I realise that these financial shennanigans are fairly boring, but they can be really important.
I forgot: pdf of order 39 is here, my summaries of all the cpa orders are here. Newspapers never seem to tell you where the original documents are
nice site