#Trade Sanctions

[lexlawuk]

Court Dismisses Force Majeure & Trade Sanctions Control Defences

The High Court granted a summary judgment application in a breach of contract claim, and delivered a clear signal regarding reliance on contractual force majeure and trade sanctions provisions. The case in question is Litasco SA v Der Mond Oil and Gas Africa SA & Anor (Rev1) [2023] EWHC 2866 (Comm). The central question was whether payments to a Russian Oil Company were prohibited as…

[davidaugust]

Eggs are now scarce and expensive, and he's placing tariffs and sanctions on Colombia, the largest trading partner with the US for coffee. So coffee prices will skyrocket.

Did he forget he's president of a country that started a revolution over taxes on our breakfast beverage.

He's not sharp. ☕ 🍳

[affairsmastery]

The US and China continue their tit-for-tat trade battle as 10% tariffs hit Chinese imports. In response, China has filed a WTO complaint and is set to impose a 15% tax on US coal, LNG, and cars starting Monday.

Meanwhile, signs suggest China is open to talks. Donald Trump, doubling down, signed an executive order for a sovereign wealth fund and hinted at using tariff revenue to acquire TikTok. China fired back, adding American firms like Calvin Klein to its "unreliable entities" list, while launching an antitrust probe into Google.

[silkjade]

my brain does this thing where it doesn’t let me get self ship comms until i finish designing my s/i outfit, it’s…..a defense mechanism against reckless spending ????

[tanadrin]

One question I had, just sort of an idle curiosity thing, was after the Russian forces withdrew from Ukraine in the northeast, what kept the fighting isolated mostly to the southeast, and what did the rest of the border look like between these two countries that were at war? Just guys with guns staring tensely at each other over the border fence?

Well, it turns out the answer to the first part of that question was “not a lot”!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies; they are our allies. We should beware the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag… The expansion of the international economy is not a foreign invasion; it is an American triumph, one we worked hard to achieve, and something central to our vision of a peaceful and prosperous world of freedom.

—Ronald W Reagan, radio address delivered on November 26, 1988

[Robert Scott Horton]

[nando161mando]

"Fin al comercio de armas con Israel" (ES: Español)

"End the arms trade with Israel" (EN: English)

[memenewsdotcom]

Russia adopts Chinese Yuan as main exchange

[birdmenmanga]

huh... okay... economically magi actually has a pretty coherent story... I was just unable to comprehend it when I was in middle school...

[agentfascinateur]

"Tolerating" genocide breeds impunity everywhere. Tax arms manufacturers.

The military has been fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for more than a year, in a civil war that has killed thousands and forced millions from their homes. The situation is unfolding to a "Rwanda-like" genocide of 1994(...)

Or sanction them. They make genocides possible.

[taiwantalk]

This kind of article is truly a form of media warfare. Commodities do not have to and are not going thru Black Sea only.

This is a totally misleading reporting to create panic. Ukraine is still bordering 5 other countries besides Russia & belarus. Any of those 5 countries have multiple trade routes for Ukraine’s commodities to be exported out through long convoy of transportations. Russia cannot possibly destroy every single land cargo transportation just like nazis could not destroy every single liberty ship during ww2 with a wolf pack submarines.

Therefore, Russia is far from being able to restrict Ukraine’s export like an embargo or blockade.

Likewise, the world is actually not truly able to restrict trade with Russia except by true alliance adhering to economic sanction measures.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

like I dunno I played borderlands 1 for like fifteen minutes and decided I did not want to do that shit but the idea that in a game with randomly generated loot, there is a theoretical best option, and as a result that best option is astronomically rare, I don’t know who is legitimately factoring in this astronomically rare theoretical best option into their actual practical builds

I think there are games that do this wrong (path of exile comes to mind) but they’re pretty far and few between

[swamp-world]

Mokhiber's resignation letter haunts me. If anyone hasn't read it you can do so here. Nearly ten months ago, and the sentence still without exaggeration brings me to tears:

I also worked in these halls through the genocides against the Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidi, and the Rohingya. In each case, when the dust settled on the horrors that had been perpetrated against defenseless civilian populations, it became painfully clear that we had failed in our duty to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocites[sic], of protection of the vulnerable, and of accountability for perpetrators. And so it has been with successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the entire life of the UN. High Commissioner, we are failing again.

This is a man who in the first three weeks of seeing the response and failed response from the hegemonic international community could not partake in the structures which, through discursive democratic structures (and of course veto power), continued to blockade at every turn meaningful aid or support to Palestinians, or meaningful resistance and condemnation of the Israeli response.

This is meaningful, and I don't want to understate that fact. This is an advisory opinion, which means that it's non-binding, but it does offer legitimacy. Specifically following the responses to the interim ruling, where the ICJ stated that there was a plausible case for the possibility of genocide, and people latched onto that, to insist that that means it's not, and if it was as bad as Ukraine, they would have issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu et al. They have now. They have called it apartheid, which is under the UN a separate statute and convention, but which everyone has pointed out is a form of genocide nonetheless. The cases which South Africa et al brought forwards were largely resting on this question: Is apartheid only a crime when it happens in Africa? Do you not consider apartheid a crime when the rest of the world does it? Do you consider non-African nations to be immune to committing apartheid? Will you apply the Convention on [...] the Crime of Apartheid to the rest of the world?

The answer now is that non-African nations absolutely are capable of creating apartheid states. That under the genocide convention and the rome statute aiding and abetting genocide is a crime.

But I think about Craig Mokhiber, and I wonder if this is a victory. The sentence rings in my mind: High Commissioner, we are failing again.

What does it mean? What success does this bring? When the highest possible outcome for the time being is a non-binding advisory opinion, which took ten months to be reached--is that a victory? A death toll presently in the tens of thousands, estimated to reach nearly 200,000 with famine, disease, and exposure?

The Bosnian War and Ethnic Cleansing was preceded by violence through 1990 and 1991, but is pinned as having started in about April 1992. On 18th December 1992 the UN General Assembly ruled ethnic cleansing to be a crime of genocide.

The application of the Genocide Convention by the ICJ was invoked by Bosnia & Herzegovina on the 20th March 1993, and received a provisional recommendation on the 8th April.

They requested further provisional measures on 27th July 1993 and received a response on 13th September 1993.

It took until 1994 for the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia to issue any indictments or arrest warrants, and the first trial began on 23rd February 1995.

The Bosnian War didn't end until 14th December 1995.

The ICJ didn't make a final Judgement until 26th January 2007, and the ICC didn't make its final ruling until 2017, at which point the ICTY was finally dissolved.

This is what Mokhiber wrote about. This is the process of the "dust settl[ing]" to expose the UN's failure to their "duty to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocites,[sic] of protection of the vulnerable, and of accountability for perpetrators"--the ICJ is responsive rather than proactive; the UN as a whole is.

High Commissioner, we are failing again.

This ruling is a case which was brought to the ICJ in 2022, separate from the one which South Africa is spearheading right now.

I started writing this quite pessimistically. I still don't feel great. But in writing all of this, I do feel things are changing. Not in a material way at the moment--the UN is still responsive rather than proactive, still held in a chokehold by the veto powers.

But the creation of the Rome Statute was largely in response to the specific outcomes of the criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (which I did not speak of here as I'm more familiar with Yugoslavia and for that I apologize because there's a lot of nuance and followup detail I'm missing), creating the ICC as a legitimate body. So much of what took so long with the trials with former Yugoslavia was that Yugoslavia kept filing with the ICJ about this falling out of the ICJ's jurisdiction, kept using this to hold up the cases. With the ICC in existence, that is helping to expedite the process now.

(Of course, that is a very linear view of things: it fails to address the sheer scale of mass atrocity it took to reach this point, and it treats the judicial process of Israel and Palestine as another step in the road to a Successful Justice System rather than a tragedy in itself, following in the footsteps of Bosnia and Rwanda.

High Commissioner, we are failing again.

We can say that it takes failure to create success but "failure" is a terrible word for "multiple genocides".)

Importantly, this ruling establishes the right to return, which is absolutely huge. It recommends removing the West Bank Barrier.

It is a failure and the furthest success had in international court so far, which is its own indictment. And yet--the previous provisional measures demanded Israel withdraw, which they have failed to do so. The USA has explicitly said it considers the charges against Netanyahu to be illegitimate.

The NFP in France has pledged arms embargo against Israel and recognition of Palestine as a state. Will they uphold this? Will they push for sanctions against other EU and UN states who continue to support Israel? It is beyond upsetting that it apparently does not matter if the majority of the world continues to support Palestinian liberation, or at least that it does not until a developed power like France could stand alongside. Will they keep their promise? Who will sanction the USA? Who will follow that from this ruling?

Are we failing again?

[elleven-news]

Russia Is Wooing Western Energy Companies, but Will They Return?

Kremlin officials are dangling the prospect of lucrative investment deals for American energy companies, apparently seeking to convince President Trump that large economic gains could come from siding with Moscow in ending the war in Ukraine and scrapping economic sanctions on Russia. There is no doubt that Russia has vast troves of oil and natural gas, but an effort to lure American or other…