IRAQ

Financial Times: Iraq business deals may be invalid, law experts warn

The US-led provisional authority in Iraq may be breaking international
law by selling state assets, experts have warned, raising the prospect that
contracts signed now by foreign investors could be scrapped by a future
Iraqi government. International businesspeople attending a conference
in London this week heard that some orders issued by the US-led Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) may be in breach of the 1907 Hague
Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

"Is what they are doing legitimate, is it legal?" asked Juliet Blanch,
a partner at the London-based international law firm Norton Rose. "Most
[experts] believe that their actions are not legal", she said. "There
would be no requirement for a new government to ratify their [actions]."
International law obliges occupying powers to respect laws already in
force in a country "unless absolutely prevented" from doing so.

According to international law experts, that throws doubt on the
legality of the CPA's September 19 order opening the Iraqi economy to foreign
investment. In what amounted to a blueprint for transforming Iraq into
a market economy, Order 39 permitted full foreign ownership of a wide
range of state-owned Iraqi assets, barring natural resources such as oil.

However, such sweeping economic reform may not be legal, as the UK
government was privately warned by its chief law officer in the first
days of the war. In his private advice, later leaked to the press, Lord
Goldsmith wrote that "the imposition of major structural economic
reforms would not be authorised by international law."