Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

getting it done 223Mandatory and voluntary mechanisms are not mutually exclusiveand can usefully complement each other. There is some apprehensionon the part of some human rights organizations, however, that voluntarymechanisms somewhat reflect the weakness or complacency ofgovernments toward businesses and that voluntary mechanisms maybecome a long-lasting alternative to binding and enforceable instruments.As the International Council on Human Rights Policy(2002) argues in its review of the international legal obligations ofcompanies, voluntary mechanisms alone are insufficient. Not only dolegal instruments allow for consistent and fair judgments, but “evenwhere voluntary approaches are working, . . . anchoring these in a legalframework is likely to enhance their effectiveness. And where voluntaryapproaches are not effective, a legal framework provides powerful toolsand incentives for improvement.”The most common form of international legal framework—international treaties—frequently suffers from a lack of nationalenforcement. Furthermore, as a result of negotiation and consensusbuilding, the offenses cited by such legal instruments are sometimesambiguous, while compliance measures are weak or left to nationalauthorities to define. It should therefore not be taken for granted thata mandatory international instrument will prove more effective thana voluntary one. Instruments mixing voluntary membership and mandatorycompliance—through strong incentives to join, peer or independentmonitoring, credible mutual enforcement, and threats to ensurecompliance, as in the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering(FATF)—may prove the most effective in the current internationalenvironment.Finally, enforcement instruments can be designed and applied onthree main scales: national, regional, and international.National instruments are sponsored and enacted by one government(for example, domestic legislation on customs, import-export regimes,tax codes, company law, unilateral economic sanctions). They remainthe most widely applied and possibly the most robust means of combatingconflict trade, including the national application of internationaleconomic sanctions. This strength comes from the sovereignjurisdiction and judicial capacity of states within their national territoryand in international arenas. Controversially, national instruments canalso seek extraterritorial jurisdiction, as with U.S. unilateral sanctionsseeking extraterritoriality (for example, the Helms-Burton Act) andU.S. courts accepting transnational suits (for example, the U.S. AlienTort Claims Act). However, the internationalization, growth, and multiplicationof trading channels have complicated the task of nationalauthorities, while weak judicial systems, legal loopholes, or collusion