Examination of Witnesses (Questions 306
- 316)
TUESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2006
MR ALEX
VINES
Q306 Chairman:
Mr Vines, I suspect you were somewhere in the background, listening
to what went on, so I do not need to go through the preliminaries,
other than to say first of all that you are extremely welcome
to come and help us with our inquiry. You have very kindly sent
us in some written evidence for which we are very grateful to
you. Do you want to add anything to that or say anything at the
beginning before we get cracking on the questions?
Mr Vines: No, Lord Wakeham. I am fine. The presentation
that I submitted to you is the summary of what I wanted to say.
Q307 Chairman:
That is very kind. If I may start, would you agree that economic
sanctions tend to be imposed without any proper prior assessment
of their likely effectiveness and costs? Can you point to circumstances
in which sanctions are normally imposed in a more considered way,
with a full prior assessment of effectiveness and costs?
Mr Vines: My experience is based on working
on UN sanctions. I am currently Chair of the UN expert group on
Co®te d'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, and so have had some five years
of working in this field as a sanctions inspector. The reality
is that sanctions of this type are often imposed in an ad hoc
fashion in a rush. Certainly from the UN aspect, one does not
see a proper needs assessment analysis of the actual impact of
a sanction, especially an economic sanction. There has in the
last few years been some movement towards humanitarian impact,
but this is patchy at best, and certainly there is not any ongoing
monitoring throughout the sanctions regime of the effectiveness.
Indeed, the sorts of reports that sanctions monitors like myself
produce, including commenting on the financial field, have no
independent appraisal. The only appraisal or assessment of our
work that takes place is the politics within the Security Council
committees, the sanctions committees, and those are determined
from home capitals, be that London, Moscow, Washington or wherever,
not necessarily analytically accurate in their assessment. So
you are right to ask the question. This is an area where there
is a tremendous need for a more systematic monitoring. It has
not yet been effectively imposed.
Q308 Lord Layard:
Are there recent cases in which sanctions have played a key role
in resolving a dispute? What are the circumstances where economic
sanctions are most likely to be effective in achieving the desired
objective? Is there a wider package combining sanctions with positive
incentives which would be more likely to succeed? By contrast,
when are sanctions least effective?
Mr Vines: Many of these issues were already
discussed by the Minister. Where are sanctions least effective?
Certainly when there is not international consensus within the
Security Council if you are talking about UN sanctions, or within
European Union partners if it is an EU package. You need a consensus
and political will, and this can be very patchy and ad hoc
at best. The issue of neighbours to a sanctions regime is absolutely
critical. In every case that I have seen, you need the support
of the neighbouring states. If you do not have that, it is extremely
difficult to implement sanctions. Where we do see some greater
success is where there is greater consensus and political will
or back-up. "For example, let's take Iran. We have heard
already about Libya. It was a bit more successful, especially
related to weapons of mass destruction equipment being supplied
and finding whether they were, because of proactivity of intelligence
agencies and, more important, enforcement agencies". So the
monitoring of those sanctions was less tokenistic than what we
might see elsewhere. The proliferation of sanctions that you heard
about, especially in the sub-Saharan African area- the reality
is a lot of them are very tokenistic. You may have four or five
individuals like myself but there is no back-up other than that.
So the symbol might be important but the actual effectiveness
of monitoring compliance is certainly more patchy. Related to
the circumstances in which economic sanctions are most likely
to be effective, my experience is that the targeting of individuals
can be extremely effective, especially if you have very clear-cut
indicators, meaning dates of birth, good passport intelligence
and proper dissemination of that information. The problem at the
moment, again, is that within the UN system, when you do target
an individual for these sorts of targeted economic and travel
sanctions, the information that is then distributed from the UN
Security Council relies on the good will of permanent missions
in New York. If those permanent missions forget to fax to their
home capitals, or even if they do fax or email, it gets to the
foreign ministry. After that, it is a very unpredictable process
whether it will go anywhere else. The majority of experiences
that I have are frustrating ones at border posts in Africa, for
example, where local authorities have no clue what we are talking
about on a targeted measure on an individual. So this is a very
imperfect science, to say the least, at the moment.
Q309 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Can I bring you back to North Korea and ask you whether you believe
that economic sanctions are likely to change the North Korean
mind on nuclear weapons or whether you think some form of positive
engagement and economic incentives would be preferable, or are
they just a law unto themselves and impervious to what goes on
elsewhere?
Mr Vines: A pariah state like North Korea is
very challenging, and again, the fundamental issue here is, as
we already heard in the previous session, the enthusiasm of the
People's Republic of China relating to assisting compliance. I
would, as a sanctions professional, think that maybe trying to
target some of the luxury goods, since the elite in North Korea
revolves around luxury goods and the patronage of distribution
of some of these goods might be a good area to target and may
have some effect. I have seen this elsewhere, where these sorts
of systems that rely on patronage and redistribution of commodities
that others cannot get can at least inject a sense of some isolation.
That could at least encourage some thoughtfulness, and indeed,
it may engender some divisiveness within the regime itself. In
the case of Angola, targeting a non-state actor, when the UN targeted
sanctions on individuals and named and shamed them, business people
providing various commodities, including bottled beer, for example,
to Unita rebels of Jonas Savimbi, that created great divisiveness
within the rebel movement and, as the commodities became less
available, so that weakened the resolve of the rebels and was
a contributing factor to the decline of the military effectiveness
of the rebels towards the end of the Nineties/beginning of this
Millennium.
Q310 Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay:
Yes, with my experience of a few years in Africa, I would not
want to try and run an army or a police force without beer, I
must say. The same question on Iran. You have touched on it a
bit. That is my question.
Mr Vines: Iran is a different case, and what
I do say reflects Lord Wakeham's first question to me, which is
that we actually should study in great depth the impact of US
sanctions on Iran and how the Iranians have avoided them, because
unless we draw lessons from that and really understand how the
Iranians have got around those, we cannot really construct a United
Nations sanctions regime on Iran that would be effective, I believe.
Iranian networks are extremely adept. I have looked at them myself,
from the point of view that the Iranians play a very prominent
role from time to time in sanction-busting activities in Africa,
which is where I work. I found, for example, when working on Liberia,
that Iranian networks were involved in providing arms and ammunition
to both the Taylor regime but also to the rebels that were trying
to overthrow the Taylor regime. They were in a very commercially
advantageous position at that moment in time. But how to penetrate
and have effect on these networks is tremendously challenging,
time-consuming and difficult, and I have seen no government or
independent think-tank or academic study on this, and it just
tends to worry me, this inflationary use of UN sanctions without
thinking what they actually will achieve and drawing proper lessons
from the past, and this is the one that I draw from Iran at the
moment.
Q311 Lord MacDonald of Tradeston:
Coming back to the question of sanctions in general rather than
particular countries, in the written evidence you say that the
threat of sanctions can sometimes be more effective than the actual.
Do you want to elaborate?
Mr Vines: Once you have imposed a sanction,
you are there for scrutiny of sanctions regimes and individuals.
Over time sanctions also do deteriorate in effectiveness. Complacency
draws in, people get fatigued, members of the Security Council
get tired, and so they find ways to penetrate the sanctions. But
as a diplomatic tool, the threat of sanctions can be very useful,
especially if they are known in the first stage of threatening
and imposition of them. For example, in my work at the moment
with my colleagues on Co®te d'Ivoire, we have found the threat
of targeted sanctions on individuals had a calming effect early
this year, in February, on a number of individuals. There was
a decline in hate speech, there was a change of behaviour in the
short term, for six months. It deteriorated after that but we
did see a direct effect. This should be considered as a tool.
It is not one that can be used too often, but sometimes can focus
minds, especially if you are dealing with a regime or an entity
that does believe that there is a disadvantage in being targeted
financially, not being able to travel or obtaining a pariah status.
Some societies do not want that. The Co®te d'Ivoire context
is one where this is a premium. Charles Taylor's Liberia, I would
argue, was one where that was less successful, though even there
for the first six to nine months we found some effectiveness when
the sanctions had just been imposed, but then they deteriorated
dramatically.
Q312 Lord MacDonald of Tradeston:
From your experience of Africa, have you seen any distinctive
patterns of use or success rates of sanctions in Africa? Are there
any particular lessons that you would draw from that experience
of the sanctions?
Mr Vines: There are a number of successes and
lessons to be drawn, and lessons more widely for sanctions in
general. One I have already mentioned to you, which is that you
need the compliance of neighbours. You need neighbours to support
the sanctions, otherwise you are in trouble. That is certainly
the case that we saw in Liberia, to a degree in Angola, and in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. You can tick off most of the
regimes. Where I think there is a good success is the use of secondary
sanctions on Liberia. In itself it did not change Charles Taylor's
behaviour pattern, but it did get him to get his ugly grip off
Sierra Leone and allow a democratic process then to take place
and have elections in Sierra Leone. So in terms of loosening Charles
Taylor's grip on Sierra Leone and weakening the revolutionary
Unita rebels, it was successful, but in terms of sanctions on
Liberia itself, they did not have an effect. In fact, it was more
the support of the rebels in Guinea through various other players
and a regime change agenda that probably changed the dynamics
in Liberia more than UN sanctions did. Where do we have wider
lessons other than the ones I have brought to you of neighbours?
One is where you have increasing peace-keeping operation presence.
This is a growing trend, where you have UN peace-keeping operations
on the ground who may also have a mandate to monitor UN sanctions
or, in the case of Darfur, you have an African Union force that
also has a part of a mandate that relates to sanctions. These
are potentially much more effective than just having two or three,
or five individuals at the most, travelling around the world looking
to monitor compliance. When you have 7,000 blue berets on the
ground, they can be quite helpful in assisting implementation
of sanctions.
Q313 Lord Paul:
In 2000 the House of Commons International Development Committee
was critical of the regional sanctions on Burundi and Sierra Leone
for their humanitarian costs. The Committee was also critical
of the UN for not intervening politically to ensure that those
costs were reduced. Have regional and UN sanctions policies improved
since then?
Mr Vines: The sanctions on Sierra Leone at the
time actually were not United Nations ones. On Sierra Leone we
were dealing with Economic Community of West African States' sanctions
on Sierra Leone- economic sanctions- and certainly there was a
humanitarian impact to the country related to aid disbursement,
partly also because the overseas development agency, DFID, was
reluctant to provide certain types of aid in that period. But
it was not a UN sanction. I think we do need to draw lessons from
what happened in that time and to ensure that the mistakes there
are not repeated if there are regional sanctions again. The case
of Economic Community of West African States' sanctions is that
they are very loosely implemented and very weakly policed. It
was more the main aid provider to Sierra Leone, which was the
United Kingdom's development arm, in fact, that had the most humanitarian
impact rather than anything else. What we need to see is, I believe,
greater humanitarian impact assessment when sanctions are considered
on economic issues and, unlike what the Honourable Minister said,
this is done in a very arbitrary, ad hoc fashion at the
moment within the UN system. There is now a handbook created by
the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA,
but the actual requests for humanitarian impact assessments are
on an arbitrary basis still when UN sanctions are considered.
There is still a strong lobby within the UN system that is very
hostile to first consideration of economic sanctions, but also
a counter-lobby that is very strong against proper assessment
of humanitarian impact. I have found myself from time to time
in the difficult situation of being made to be both the aggressive
sanctions investigator at the same time as having to write a report
on humanitarian impact. That is like mixing apples and oranges;
it does not work very well. They should be separate and they should
be reports that challenge each other if we are to get a good conclusion
of what the true humanitarian impact is.
Q314 Chairman:
I wonder if you could give us your views on symbolic sanctions,
sanctions where there is little chance of achieving desired change
in behaviour but may have an advantage in underlining the United
Nations and international commitments to values such as human
rights, or it may undermine the UN's credibility as an effective
force for change. I wondered where you would strike a balance
there.
Mr Vines: My Lord Chairman, I do not like symbolic
sanctions very much. They are very popular in the United States
and used widely without any real desire necessarily for real effectiveness;
it makes Congress feel good. I do believe the United Nations is
an important brand that needs defending. When you have had situations
like UN sanctions on Somalia since 1992 that have been highly
ineffective, one has to ask the question: are they any use at
all or would it be better not to undermine the sanctions brand
by having them? This is where we are in such worrying times and
where this Committee's hearing is so important. There is an inflationary
use of sanctions now, they are a growth industry. That is nice
for me as an investigator but there is not clear thought about
how they are being used and how they should be designed. We need
to cut away from this emotionalism and look coolly at where they
are effective, what are the successes and failures, and that has
not been done as assiduously as I believe it should be.
Q315 Lord Layard:
Could I ask about sanctions on diamonds and timber. Can they contribute
significantly to conflict reduction or are they just an inconvenience?
Mr Vines: The wars in Africa, especially the
civil war in Angola and the one in Sierra Leone, created the process
that set up the Kimberley certification scheme for diamonds which
on balance is a good process. There are all sorts of problems
within it but if you look at the statistics it has provided more
quality gemstones going through the official diamond network in
Sierra Leone, so the government, although it taxes diamonds at
a very low rate, is earning some revenue, so there is less on
the informal markets. The logic of it is that such a process will
deny rebel groups and others access to revenue and legitimate
governments will benefit from it. We are now at a second stage.
The recent work of the group that I am chairing at the moment,
the Co®te d'Ivoire Expert Group, just produced a report published
last Wednesday on the UN website, which showed how the Kimberley
Process is being contaminated by conflict diamonds from the Ivory
Coast through Ghana's certification scheme. Basically blood diamonds
are entering the international process by being issued Ghanaian
certificates of origin and ending up in Dubai, Antwerp and other
markets. This is very dangerous for the industry. The brand is
an emotive one based on imagery of love, affection and other images,
and associating these diamonds with conflict is certainly dangerous
when this is a commodity that could be threatened. I believe that
what needs to happen now is that the Kimberley Process should
look at how to strengthen its internal controls, meaning look
at the points where certificates of origin are issued and find
a more scientific way of assessing what the provenance, the origin
of those diamonds is. I believe the Kimberley Process is holding
a plenary meeting in Gaborone at the beginning of November and
I will be there with my colleagues and we are hoping to see what
progress is going to be made. The sad part of the story at the
moment is that Ghana is in a state of denial, saying that we have
not got quality information, that we cannot prove what we have
stated in our report to the Security Council. I believe we have
accurate information and, indeed, we have additional information
on this that a law enforcement investigation in Belgium, in Antwerp,
at the moment is being undertaken and within about a year I hope
that we will see prosecutions relating to this case. On the question
of timber, we have only had one sanction on timber so far which
is that in Liberia. The Liberia case is slightly different in
context from the one the minister described earlier. Timber sanctions
were imposed late in the day on Liberia after Charles Taylor was
already just about to leave for forcible retirement to Calabar
in Nigeria and they were very much more a regime change issue
at the time, a statement, rather than about reforming the timber
industry. What we do have in Liberia, and I think it is important
for this Committee to look at it, is where you have sanctions
that are now in place related to trying to reform the management
of the economic assets of Liberia. The logic of this is that if
you reform those you may deny future conflict. The challenge of
this is whether this is possible and one question I would ask
the Committee to consider is, is this the right format for UN
sanctions to be looking at post-conflict transformation of an
economy or is that something that the financial institutions and
others should be focusing on? It is very experimental in Liberia
but I believe it is very important that a committee like this
one looks at it because, if it is successful, it is a precedent
for elsewhere; but if it is not successful, then it needs to be
considered whether this was one step too far for a sanctions regime
imposed by the UN.
Q316 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Can we turn now to targeted financial sanctions imposed on individuals.
It seems that their application is something of a burden on the
financial services industry and there are substantial numbers
of individuals targeted but the sums of money involved are quite
small. Do you think these sanctions are effective and, if so,
are there any other factors at work here beyond the relatively
insignificant amounts of assets frozen?
Mr Vines: It is true that the figures involved
are very insignificant. If you look at the Liberia seizures they
are only a few million dollars at the most. UNITA was even less.
Part of the reason is that as soon as a sanction is considered
these assets move very fast or they are moved in cash or commodities,
so it is very difficult to track them. I believe that targeted
sanctions on individuals, as I have already said, are important.
But I believe that small numbers of targeted individuals are much
more effective than large numbers as are quality indicators (as
is the jargon in the trade). You need to have quality information;
the passport details, date of birth, where the passport was issued,
how many passports an individual might have, all need to be clearly
indicated, if we are to have a chance of success at tracking those
individuals. It is the same with bank accounts. Also, the justification:
one of the areas of progress in the UN is, after a number of mishaps,
there is now at least justification as to why someone is sanctioned
and why an account is frozen. That is on the UN website, so the
individuals or the entities that are targeted will actually know
what the criteria are. A few years ago it was a terrible situation,
one would sit in a sanctions committee meeting—I am not
breaking any secrets here to you—a country would have proposed
a name and when asked they would say, "That is our intelligence,
we cannot tell you"; and there was no due process, there
was no accountability. We are improving on this now and it is
very important, including that the individuals who are targeted
know why they are there. I recently had an argument with a targeted
individual who said, "No, some of the criteria are correct
but, in fact, they have missed the most important things that
I have done. I was in charge of a military operation in X and
I did that". He was rather proud of some of the dark side
of his activities and disappointed that it was not up on the UN
website.
Chairman: That is a good way in which
to end. We have had a number of evidence sessions over the last
few weeks on this subject and this is officially our last session
of oral evidence, but I have to say I do not think the Committee
would have been as well informed if we had not had your evidence
today. We are extremely grateful to you for coming along and answering
our questions. Thank you very much indeed.
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