Business with occupied territories, Orange telecom, and the French approach to international law
Business with occupied territories, Orange telecom, and the French approach to international law
...The French Ambassador to the U.S., (and formerly Israel), defended the Orange CEO’s statement on Twitter:‘
“4th Geneva convention : settlement policy in occupied territories is illegal. It is illegal to contribute to it in any way.”
That statement is entirely baseless. Even if settlements are illegal, there is no ban on business in the territories, or with settlers. Certainly there is no tertiary obligation to not do business with businesses that have some tangential business in such territory. All this is demonstrated extensively in my new paper, some of which I tried to share with Amb. Araud.
Perhaps the most instructive aspect of this was the reaction of Amb. Araud, when I pointed out to him that his legal claim is baseless, and squarely contradicted by France’s own courts in recent decisions involving Israel, which held the Geneva Conventions flatly inapplicable to private companies. It is also contradicted by the opinions the U.N. Security Council Legal Advisor, the EU Parliament’s legal advisor, and the U.K. Supreme Court, and more. (All these are described at length in my new paper.)
The Orange incident, and the Ambassador’s legal claim, are also bad news for a number of French companies, like the oil giant Total, which is active in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara against the vociferous protests of the indigenous Sawahari people. (There are many other examples, like Michelin in Turkish-occupied Cyprus.) The French government has never criticized any of these controversial activities in any way. But if the Ambassador’s legal claim is right, he has provided the basis for war crimes prosecutions of France’s leading executives.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/06/04/business-with-occupied-territories-and-the-french-approach-to-international-law/
