Human Rights and Private Wrongs: Constructing Global Civil Society by Alison Brysk

Author:Alison Brysk [Brysk, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136073946
Google: OCF0N2bkcrcC
Goodreads: 17578059
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-12-25T00:00:00+00:00

Cutting off Capital: Harnessing State Sanctions

As asset control has emerged as a tool of foreign policy, it has also become a potential pathway for the pursuit of financial accountability for human rights violations. Although asset control is generated by states and generally applied to state violators, it plays a role complementary to that of the private pathways profiled earlier. Government sanctions against repressive regimes are usually sought by global civil society activists as part of a multifaceted campaign of boycotts, disinvestment, and legal action against both repressive regimes and their financial supporters. Sanctions often include state bans on private trade or investment, above and beyond interstate freezing of leaders’ assets. This subtype of state sanctions on business also relies—and sometimes founders—on the private power of business to influence target regimes’ policies and survival. The recent extension of asset control from deposed dictators to terrorists further intertwines public accountability, private flows, and private violators. Thus, state sanctions bear further examination as a distinct but related mechanism of human rights conditionality.

Guarantees of the sanctity of transnational financial property have always been subject to one significant exception: state security. Although the developed countries condemn economically based asset freezes and seizures (such as postrevolutionary nationalization of foreign investment), the U.S. and European banking centers have retained an arsenal of tools for asset control on security grounds. In response to evolving security threats and understandings, such mechanisms have expanded in range, frequency, and multilateralism. At the same time, by the 1980s human rights campaigns had moved from foreign aid conditionality to a recognition of the direct investor or purchasing role of northern governments in repressive regimes or exploitative multinationals. Thus, they began to scrutinize or suggest state sanctions. Sanctions may include bans on direct interstate economic transactions, government prohibition of trade or exchange by its citizens with a foreign government, national regulation of multinationals operating overseas, attempts to penalize foreign governments or firms for trading with a targeted regime, or participation in a multilateral prohibition or limitation of trade or investment in a specific country or region.

Unlike reparations or socially responsible investment, sanctions were designed not to promote human rights accountability but rather to punish regimes. But the promotion of human rights has periodically been served by the availability of local, national, and multilateral cutoffs of capital, even when such measures were adopted for unrelated or mixed purposes. Even symbolic state sanctions send a message to pariah regimes and third parties that may inform their long-term relationships. State sanctions can also have a multiplier effect on grassroots disinvestment or boycotts, as they seemed to do in South Africa (Rodman 2001). Government asset seizures may provide the funds to satisfy reparations judgments—as in the Marcos case discussed later. However, in some situations, unilateral state sanctions based on security may actually undermine human rights practices, multilateral institutions, and civic campaigns, as was widely alleged in Iraq during the 1990s. The coercive cutoff of capital is a blunt instrument, which must be carefully analyzed for appropriateness and effectiveness in particular cases, especially when private actors are implicated in the human rights violations.

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