I was invited to testify before the Senate of Canada, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, on issues relating to two pieces of legislation that form part of Canada’s economic sanctions laws. The full testimony can be found here (commencing half way through the full session), and a couple of clips of my answers to questions on the effectiveness of economic sanctions, and the lawfulness of secondary sanctions, were posted to YouTube by Senator Woo, and can be found here, and here. I was invited to testify in light of my report Economic Sanctions Under International Law: A Guide for Canadian Policy, published in 2021.
human rights
Why Canada Should Rethink its Approach to Economic Sanctions
(Published in The Conversation, Mar. 6, 2022)
Western countries have imposed massive sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The West has increasingly relied on economic sanctions to punish or change the policies of foreign governments in the last several decades. The conventional wisdom is that economic sanctions are an effective and peaceful foreign policy tool.
Some sanctions regimes, such as the current effort against Russia, may be both effective and lawful. But as I explored in a recent research report, some economic sanctions may violate international law principles, including those the sanctions are intended to enforce. They may therefore undermine the very legal regimes that Canadians like to champion.
The nature of economic sanctions
Many economic sanctions are authorized by the United Nations Security Council or regional organizations. But countries are increasingly imposing sanctions without such legal authority. It’s these so-called unilateral or autonomous sanctions that raise legal questions.
Canada’s Not Back Yet: Debating Canada’s Place in the World
(Published in A Blog Called Intrepid, Jul. 27, 2020).
Canada’s failure to win a seat in the United Nations Security Council has provoked a debate over Canada’s place in the world. It was seen as a personal failure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who when elected famously declared that “Canada is back!” But it has raised deeper questions regarding the reasons for the failure, what Canada’s role in the world should be, and indeed what it once was—should we want to be “back?” And what does that mean anyway?
Some have suggested that the past that Trudeau invoked is more myth than fact, and that we should, in any event, look to the future with a more narrowly pragmatic and realpolitik approach. But the soft power and outsized diplomatic influence that Canada wielded during the latter half of the Twentieth Century is no myth—and I would argue it is important to understand what explained Canada’s stature in the world, and indeed to get “back” to embracing the principles that made us who we then were. Those principles are closer to the values that still make us who we are today as a nation.
I personally witnessed evidence of this influence in the autumn of 1989. I was a junior naval attaché seconded to serve in the Canadian Mission to the United Nations in New York City. Joe Clark, then the Minister of External Affairs in the Mulroney government, was to address the General Assembly at the end of September, and Canada was to take over the rotating presidency of the Security Council in October. It was an exciting time to be at the UN, as the Berlin Wall was coming down and there were other seismic shifts suggesting a coming new world order. But like most members of Canada’s then under-funded military, I shared the perspective that Canada’s anemic hard power gave it little influence in the world.
The Torture Photos and U.S. Double Standards on Freedom of Speech
(Cross-posted from Tubler.com, Jan. 25, 2015).
Jameel Jaffer had an excellent post on Just Security earlier this week, examining the apparent inconsistency in U.S. policy on freedom of speech. On the one hand, the U.S. government argued against self-censorship in response to threatened violence, in the context of Charlie Hebdo, and Sony’s distribution of the “The Interview”. On the other hand, the U.S. government was in Federal Court this week resisting requests that photographic evidence of U.S. detainee abuse and torture be made public.
The argument of the government is that disclosure of the pictures would make them available for use in propaganda, and would likely lead to violent reactions. In essence, the government wants to suppress information to prevent possible violent reprisals. Jameel Jaffer dismisses this argument well:
This is not a good argument for the suppression of the photographs. The same kind of argument could as easily have been made with respect to the Abu Ghraib photos, the Rodney King video, or the Eric Garner video. It could as easily have been made with respect to the Senate’s torture report—and, in fact, it was. And it’s not just that the argument gives those who threaten violence a veto over political debate; it gives the government a veto, too. To accept the argument, at least in the absence of a specific, credible threat directed against specific people, is to give the government far-reaching power to suppress evidence of its own misconduct. And the worse the misconduct, the stronger would be the government’s argument for suppression.