Sovereignty, jurisdiction and international law

Sovereignty, jurisdiction and international law

25 June 2016

Singapore/Indonesia– In 2014, Singapore enacted the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, which came into force on Sept 25, 2014. Essentially, the Act makes it an offence for any entity to engage in conduct, or to condone conduct, causing or contributing to haze pollution in Singapore. Apart from criminal liability, the Act also creates statutory duties and civil liabilities.

The Act is unusual but not unprecedented in targeting conduct that occurs outside Singapore, and which causes or contributes to haze pollution in Singapore.

Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, speaking in Parliament in August 2014, said the Act “is not intended to replace the laws and enforcement actions of other countries, but it is to complement the efforts of other countries to hold companies to account”. He added that “we, in Singapore, cannot simply wait and wishfully hope that the problem will be resolved on its own. The Singapore Government would want to send a strong signal that we will not tolerate the actions of errant companies that harm our environment and put at risk the health of our citizens”.

EXTRATERRITORIALITY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

There were mixed reactions to this law in Indonesia. Some parties expressed support for Singapore’s law. Others, including some Indonesian ministers, criticised the law on the grounds that it was a violation of Indonesia’s sovereignty. A typical comment was: “As it happened in Indonesia, it is part of Indonesia’s jurisdiction. If Singapore could easily try Indonesian citizens, it could be a violation of Indonesia’s sovereignty.”

The Singapore Government responded that the law was consistent with international law. It was drafted with the advice of international law experts and did not violate the sovereignty of any country.

The issue is whether it is permissible for a country to enact legislation that would have extraterritorial reach. The answer to this question turns on a proper understanding of the established principles of international law.

The general principle in international law is that states exercise jurisdiction on a territorial basis, namely, over persons, property and acts within its territory. However, there are exceptions to this principle.

One exception is a group of crimes that attract universal jurisdiction. Examples are piracy, genocide, torture, slavery, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes. For instance, under this exception, it is permissible for an Indonesian or Singapore court to try persons accused of committing piracy, such as Somali pirates, even if the acts of piracy occurred outside their respective maritime jurisdictions.

Another exception involves crimes committed outside a state’s territory but which have harmful effects on the state concerned.

There are many examples, including bribery and corruption, terrorism, cybercrimes and cyber attacks and pollution. Such an exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction can be justified under several principles of international law, notably the “objective territoriality principle”.

To argue that states cannot exercise such jurisdiction would mean that states are powerless to deal with a variety of situations where individuals, groups and corporations can, with impunity, carry out acts outside their territories which have harmful effects and consequences on them.

INTERDEPENDENT WORLD

Indeed, the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) 2006 Report stated that “today, the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction by a state with respect to persons, property or acts outside its territory has become an increasingly common phenomenon”.

The ILC said this phenomenon is due largely to increased movements of persons beyond national borders, the growing number of multinational corporations, globalising of the world economy, increased transnational criminal activities, increased illegal migration and increased use of the Internet for legal or illegal purposes.

To that, we will add the growing interdependence between nations, and the undeniable fact that we live in a fragile environmental ecosystem, where harmful polluting activities in one country can cause serious harm, not only to its own people but to the people of other countries. The nature of transboundary offences necessarily means that multiple states do have a legitimate interest in bringing the offenders to justice.

It cannot therefore be said that any of these states would be acting in contravention of the offending state’s sovereignty by enforcing its own laws. Such a violation of sovereignty would arise in some cases, such as, for example, if a state were to send its firefighters into the territory of another state, without its consent, to put out a fire.

Clearly, Singapore’s legislation does not seek to do this. The law is enforced only when the party accused of causing the harmful act enters Singapore and comes within Singapore’s jurisdiction.

We should add that Indonesia itself has enacted laws that have extraterritorial reach, such as its laws on corruption and on electronic transactions.

CONCLUSION

In a previous contribution to The Straits Times, (“The haze, international law and global cooperation”, Oct 6, 2015), we discussed the principle of international law that a state has the sovereign right to exploit its natural resources, including its forests. However, that sovereign right is limited by a second principle, namely that a state has the responsibility to ensure that activities within its jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other states.

We explained that there is a clear rule in international law that acts committed in one territory that cause environmental harm to the territory of another state constitute a legal wrong. It is, therefore, consistent with international law for Singapore to hold accountable individuals and companies that have caused the fires in Indonesia or elsewhere for that matter, and which have, in turn, caused the haze pollution in Singapore.

Singapore and Indonesia are close friends and partners. We are two of the founding members of Asean. Under Article 2, paragraph 2 of the Asean Charter, Asean and its member states are committed to adhering to the rule of law and upholding international law.

Indonesia insists that the haze issue be resolved under the Asean Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution. We agree that we should use the Asean agreement, as well as other bilateral, regional and international agreements, to solve this problem. However, such agreements cannot curtail Singapore’s right to take actions that are in compliance with international law.

Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act is consistent with international law. It does not violate Indonesia’s sovereignty.

On the contrary, Indonesia should welcome Singapore’s law, which complements Indonesia’s efforts to hold accountable those errant companies and individuals that have acted in blatant disregard of the serious harm they have caused to the people of Indonesia as well as those of its neighbours.New Research on the California spotted owl has found that severely burned forests that have not been post-fire salvage logged are used by the threatened raptor when foraging for their small mammal prey. Stand-replacing fires, also called crown fires or high-intensity fires, do not harm spotted owl foraging habitat.

“We looked at spotted owl foraging behavior at multiple spatial extents and we found that whatever scale we used, the owls foraged in severely burned unlogged forests in proportion to their availability. In other words, they foraged in burned forest with the same likelihood as in unburned forest.” said Monica Bond, lead author of the study.

Wildfires over the past two decades have affected southern California spotted owl habitat to a greater extent than elsewhere in the range of the subspecies. From 2003 to 2007, spotted owl territories in the region were especially affected by wildfire, with more than 40% of 168 breeding sites in the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains experiencing at least one fire.

“These frequent and hot fires make southern California forests a good indicator of what may happen in more northerly forests of California in a warming climate,” said Bond. “Luckily, forests burned by high-severity fire can still be considered suitable foraging habitat for Californiaspotted owls.”

Bond continued, “We also found these spotted owls strongly selected foraging sites close to streambeds, so we recommend implementing protective measures and management activities that conserve water and streamside forests.”

The study was published this week by scientists from the Wild Nature Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity in theJournal of Wildlife Management, a peer-reviewed scientific journal for professional wildlife biologists.

This is the latest in a series of scientific papers that have documented how resilient spotted owls are to high-severity fires, including so-called megafires. Spotted owl pairs have been shown to survive and continue to reproduce in breeding sites that experienced severe fire, even megafire, with success that is the same or higher than unburned sites. Spotted owls have also shown a significant preference for foraging in severely burned forest patches in the Sierra Nevada. However, post-fire salvage logging, also called forest restoration by the US Forest Service, causes site abandonment and reduces survival. Logging in an attempt to reduce the risk of fire, often called thinning or fuels reduction, also has adverse effects on spotted owls. The only studies that claimed forest fires hurt spotted owls have had logging in large portions of the study area.

“It’s high time we stopped managing our forests with the futile and unnecessary goal of stopping severe fires. All the science from the field says fuel buildup and insects don’t make forest fires worse. It is extreme weather like the Santa Anna winds in southern California that push fires to become very large, but we will never be able to stop these weather-driven blazes, so we should not risk our firefighter’s lives out in the wildlands. Instead, we should repurpose the billions of dollars we waste each year fighting wildfires on making structures fire-safe in our forest communities,” said Dr. Derek Lee, a co-author of the study. “Many native plants and animals thrive in the severely burned unlogged forest, and that response tells us that this kind offire is natural and necessary to the ecology of theforest.”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-evidence-forest-threaten-owls.html#jCpNew Research on the California spotted owl has found that severely burned forests that have not been post-fire salvage logged are used by the threatened raptor when foraging for their small mammal prey. Stand-replacing fires, also called crown fires or high-intensity fires, do not harm spotted owl foraging habitat.

24. November 2017/by GFMCadmin