Unilateral or collective responses to international wrongs: the case of natural resources

Speaker: Professor Phoebe Okowa (Queen Mary University London)
Chair: Dr Danae Azaria (University College London)

About this event

Who has the right to exploit Libya’s oil reserves[1]? Since the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011 there has been no identifiable source of political authority and two loosely allied militia groups, ‘Operation dignity’ and ‘Libya Dawn’ coalition have been competing for legitimacy and with it authority to exploit Libya’s national resources. Although only one of these groups (Libya Dawn) is recognised by the UN and the international community, the recognition is only a partial reflection of the   political realities on the ground; the idea that Libya has a representative government is largely a fiction; in practice what one finds is a patchwork of militia groups exercising varying degrees of control over Libya’s vast territory.

Equally, what is to be the attitude of the international community to Syria’s oil reserves in the face of evidence that the so called Islamic state and Kurdish militia groups have been funding the insurgency by selling Syria’s oil both to the Assad regime and on the international market[2]? In these two most recent conflicts, the war over natural resources has taken the form of a war within a civil war with profoundly unsettling consequences for the populations of the two countries. They are the latest manifestation of a recurrent problem in modern conflicts; The conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Congo, profoundly underlined the importance of international oversight, in particular whether the existing international mechanisms placed appropriate constraints on the use of natural resources for the purposes of funding or perpetuating an unpopular war not in the interest of the population.

The systemic weaknesses of international law ‘lex lata’ are now well documented and the most recent examples of international oversight side-step classical international instruments by imposing obligations directly on individuals and corporations for their extra-territorial activities. Focusing on the measures undertaken by the United States legislation in the Dodd- Frank Act, with a view to stamping illegal trade in Congolese minerals, this paper explores the main pitfalls of unilateral national initiatives. It concludes that in so far as these foreign instruments are drafted without any input from the local population or their representatives, they raise profound questions of democratic legitimacy; not only are they ineffective they may arguably also be inconsistent with international law.

About the speaker

Phoebe Okowa is Professor of Public International Law at Queen Mary University of London and a Global Visiting Professor at NYU law school. A Kenyan national, she holds law degrees from the University of Nairobi and Oxford. Professor Okowa is the joint editor of Foundations of Public International Law (Oxford University Press) and Queen Mary Studies in International Law (Brill).

She has published extensively on a wide range of topics including the law of state responsibility, use of force and the protection of natural resources in conflict zones, as well as the relationship between state and individual responsibility for international crimes. Her current research explores unilateral and collective responses to illegal exploitation of natural resources in conflict zones.