Aegis Trust

Our friends and partners at ND Burma have released this new report today on the arbitrary and excessive system of 'taxation' in Burma.

What does taxation have to do with mass atrocities?

At its best a tax system can cement the bonds between citizen and state.  The theory is that citizens demand accountability for the money they hand over to the state - demanding oversight and some form of democratic control.  A lack of such a bond between citizen and state can be profoundly damaging - witness the abuses committed by many oil rich states or (less commonly) states overly dependent upon development aid.  In such rentier states accountability and oversight is absent or, at best, owed to international donors.

The theory goes on:  pushy taxpayers creating checks and balances over the executive branch will have a spillover effect into other areas of governance.  Some of these effects may be important in preventing future mass atrocities: democratic oversight of the military; an end to winner takes all politics; and leaders more responsive to the demands of a broad taxpayer base.

That's roughly the theory; of course middle class taxpayers can be anti-democratic  also (witness Weimar Germany at one extreme, the Thai middle classes at the other).

And in Burma?  Well lets just say there's a thin line between pillage and taxation.  Many of the international crimes committed in Burma result from the requirement that the Tatmadaw be self-sufficient.  This order created the  incentives for individual units to resort to forced labour and pillage in order to live off the land.   Checkpoints, requirements to hand over foodstuffs, land confiscation all follow... As this excellent report says:  "the military has transformed taxation from a routine and legitimate function of government into extortion and a tool of repression."

Sweden has; the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland haven't.  The ICTR prosecutor would like to, the Appeals Chamber disagrees.  I'm referring of course to the transfer or extradition of Rwandan genocide suspects back to Rwanda to face trial.  Such proceedings have all been affected by concerns about the fairness of any trial.  

Not touching on fair trial issues, the ICLS have published a very useful note on Rwanda's Transfer Law - of interest to any lawyer or diplomat considering the nuts and bolts of transfer and extradition.

Xue Hanqin has just been elected to the International Court of Justice.  You can find some glimpses of her views in a 2006 article: vaguely supportive of the ICC, not a fan of universal jurisdiction.  Relevant section on UJ below:

 At the moment, one of the most controversial issues with international criminal law is the question of universal jurisdiction. Under traditional international law, states establish universal jurisdiction over certain international crimes by treaty terms except for one case, piracy. In other words, regardless of general jurisdictional grounds on territory, nationality, protection and so on, states establish national criminal jurisdiction over certain offences simply by the physical presence of the alleged suspect. In exercising such criminal jurisdiction, not only judicial assistance is assured between the state parties under the relevant treaty, rules of sovereign immunity are also respected under general international law. The early conventions on human rights are vague on the point, but state practice and international court decisions support this position. In the Pinochet case, although the British House of Lords declined to embrace one Lord's opinion grounding extradition on international custom regarding universal jurisdiction, its ruling did affect the doctrine of Act of State as practiced in the past. By pronouncing what constitutes or does not constitute an act of state of another state, or by national legislation to establish absolute universal jurisdiction, national courts would likely exercise jurisdiction over cases that may lead to international disputes by unduly encroaching upon the domestic affairs of other states. So far state practice shows over-extended national jurisdiction, either civil or criminal, is not conducive to promoting international efforts in suppressing international crimes, nor to maintaining international peace and stability.

HT: Julian Ku at Opinio Juris 

 

The Irish Centre for Human Rights has just released an extensive report on the Rohingya people of Burma:  Crimes Against Humanity in Western Burma:  The Situation of of the Rohingyas.  The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group resident in North Arakan state in Western Burma.  The report finds that there is a prima facie case that crimes  against humanity have been committed against them, namely forced labour, deportation and forcible transfer, rape and sexual violence, and persecution.

What was the long term economic impact of the Final Solution in Russia?  Daron Acemoglu - well known for his work on the long term role of institutions (rule of the game) on economic growth - and colleagues - have a new paper out which seeks to provide an answer.   They hypothesize that it was the murder of a significant portion of the middle class which had a long term structural effect on the Russian economy.

Fascinating, not least as a reason why development agencies should take conflict and mass atrocities more seriously than they do.  Odd to see no comparisons with Rwanda though; some estimates have per capita GDP being 25-30% higher than if the genocide had not taken place.   

(Hat tip:   Chris Blattman)

This is wrong.  Just wrong.    

Last week's Economist had a piece on North Korea remarkable for the numbers of mays, mights and maybes it employed.  Not the fault of the author of course but a reflection of how little we know about life above the 38th parallel.

Ever since the sinking of the South Korean warship the Cheonan, determined by an international report to have been caused by a North Korean torpedo, the world's media has renewed its attempt to fathom out what's going on within a state which is going through a slow motion succession crisis.  (Or is it?  No one really knows for sure.)

Another route in to understanding North Korea has been taken by Barbara Demick in her book, Nothing to Envy, Real Lives in North Korea.  She attempts to recreate the lives of six ordinary people from the city of Chongjin using interviews from defectors.  She starts conventionally enough with the famous satellite image of North Korea at night - blacked out through economic collapse, in stark contrast to street lights and neon of the South.  But she then takes us off in a completely different direction - showing how, for two young lovers in ultra-conservative North Korea, the darkness allows romance to blossom.

The tragedy is that both slowly realize they want to defect as the man made famine led to hundreds of emaciated corpses in the street, yet such is the fear generated by the informers employed by state security, that neither feels able to confide in each other.

Highly recommended.

Our friends at the Center for Justice and Accountability - and the victims and survivors they work with - should be celebrating tonight.  The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that their case against former Somali Prime Minister Yousef Samantar can go ahead.  At issue was a) whether or not state officials (as opposed to the foreign state itself) were immune from prosecution and lawsuits and b) if so, whether this immunity applied to former state officials.  

The answer essentially gives a little (albeit narrowly argued) boost to the Pinochet precedent - former heads of state are not immune from prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. 

CJA are an NGO to watch.  Quietly, and unnoticed by many outside the U.S., they are establishing themselves as the equivalent of the ICC with regard to at least two situations - Guatemala and Somalia - where impunity for past human rights abuses is widespread and there are no domestic remedies.  Their responsible use of Spain's universal jurisdiction laws has enabled the case against many of the perpetrators in Guatemala to be heard in public, and the coincidental immigration patterns that brought many of the senior players in the brutal Somali regime of Siad Barre to the U.S. has meant that finally some of the victims of the abuses of that era are having their day in court. 

 

In the run up to the 2010 elections our friends at ONE have interviewed the main party leaders on their International Development policies. The political will is there from all three leaders (I've shared a platform with Nick Clegg speaking passionately about Darfuri asylum seekers during his campaign to be leader of the Lib Dems, early in his leadership David Cameron spoke about the Sudan at an Aegis event and the Tories frequently visit Rwanda, and in the video below Gordon Brown places his commitment to international development in the context of being moved by one particular story of a little boy killed during the Rwandan genocide - whose life history he learned about at the Aegis Trust's Kigali Memorial Centre) they all just need to be held to their promises.

A lot of heat, but very little, light has been generated by the suggestion that the Pope be prosecuted in the UK for crimes against humanity.

The sexual crimes of paedophiles need to be punished appropriately, and any form of obfuscation and cover-up by authorities exposed, condemned and rectified.  However, the suggestion that the Pope be arrested in the UK or crimes against humanity is a dead end for those looking for justice and accountability.

The UK doesn't have jurisdiction over non-residents for crimes against humanity - we don't have ‘true' universal jurisdiction.  This idea fails at the first hurdle - regardless of the subsequent questions of whether he is immune, whether the acts qualify as crimes against humanity, and whether the UK Director of Public Prosecutions and Attorney General would agree that such a prosecution would pass the public interest test.  Myself I suspect that the answer to the last 3 questions are a) he'd be considered immune, b) doubtful, c) never.