Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 31st, 2016

Evidence of meeting #30 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was individuals.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Statutory Review of the Freezing Assets of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act and the Special Economic Measures Act

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Zachary Goldman Executive Director, Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law, As an Individual

Kim Nossal Centre for International and Defence Policy, Queen's University, As an Individual

George Lopez University of Notre Dame, As an Individual

Clara Portela Singapore Management University, As an Individual

5:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bob Nault

Thank you very much, Mr. Lopez and Madam Zahid.

Our time is pretty much done, colleagues.

There are a couple of matters.

Mr. Lopez, one matter was brought up by Mr. Mendicino in your conversation with him as it related to the expert panels. If there is a particular country that is the focus of sanctions and it is not part of the Security Council's ability to put sanctions on them, then is the United States looking through its own lens, through an expert panel, at whether those sanctions are successful or not in regard to countries that are not part of the UN sanctions process?

5:25 p.m.

Prof. George Lopez

My experience is that U.S. government people rely very heavily on the information provided by expert panels. They also engage experts in their own bureaucracy to try to double-check or extend that analysis.

Often, the policies of the U.S. of late have been that when new perpetrators or sanctions violators have been found by expert panels, we lobby heavily within the Security Council to get those people listed and sanctioned. When that's not possible, OFAC does its individual foreign policy work and uses the existing—even thin—UN sanctions that are in place as a springboard for the U.S. system to then impose targeted financial sanctions and the like.

This, of course, has led to a small set of disagreements with the Russians and Chinese, who believe that sanctions set by the Security Council are the global norm and the ceiling that you can't go beyond, but I think the U.S. and many other western states believe that when you have that global agreement, the nations doing individual implementation can use it as a springboard rather than being constrained by a ceiling.

5:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bob Nault

Thank you very much.

We probably have a number of other questions, and we apologize for our technical difficulties this afternoon.

On behalf of the committee, Professor Portela and Professor Lopez, thank you very much for your time and your information. If there are other outstanding papers or issues that would be of use to us during our study, I encourage you to send them to our clerk and our committee. We are certainly looking to get as much expert information as we can in our study of this particular file.

Again, on behalf of the committee, thank you very much.

Colleagues, I will see you on Wednesday. The meeting is adjourned.