Suchergebnisse

In February 1997 the Australian media disclosed that the Papua New Guinea government had engaged a private company-Sandline International-to supply mercenaries and military equipment to eliminate secessionist leaders on Bougainville island and repossess the giant Panguna mine. Events took a further dramatic turn on 17 March 1997 when the commander of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, Brigadier General Jerry Singirok, announced publicly that he would no longer cooperate with what he called the government's 'corrupt deal'. Singirok's act of defiance precipitated the most serious political crisis in Papua New Guinea's twenty two years of independence. This volume presents the impressions of a number of ANUbased scholars of Papua New Guinea politics who watched closely as these events unfolded. It also sets out a chronology of the main events and reproduces some of the key documents relating to the Sandline Affair. It will provide a useful resource to researchers and others interested in this remarkable episode in Papua New Guinea's postindependence political history.

In the UK, it is commonly proposed that the accountability gap resulting from ministers' reluctance to accept responsibility for departmental failures could be closed by giving parliamentary select committees stronger investigative powers. In the Sandline affair, the Foreign Affairs Committee sought to take on such a role, notwithstanding that a separate external inquiry was already under way. This paper compares the two mechanisms of accountability. It concludes that committees are poorly suited to investigate high-profile administrative failures because they are too influenced by party politics. Independent inquiries are better for the purpose (though improvements are needed here too). A parliamentary resolution gave the inquiry primacy over the committee in the Sandline case. This may become an important precedent. 52 References. Adapted from the source document.

Review of Enemies Within: Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Sandline crisis: The Inside Story, by Mary-Louise O'Callaghan. Sydney: Doubleday. This book gives an extremely detailed account of those unprecedented events. According to this book, the worst thing about the detention of the Sandline commander, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, by the PNG military, was that he missed the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. Bad Show! This book reads like a thriller.

This paper examines the Sandline Affair that occurred in the late 1990s in the United Kingdom and analyzes the process by which the British government officials became involved in violating United Nations sanctions against Sierra Leone during a civil war in the 1990s. In 1997, a military coup which was the third one since the outbreak of the conflict occurred, the civilian government was overthrown, and President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was forced into exile in Guinea. The international community expressed its disapproval of the coup. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a sub-regional organisation of West African countries, imposed an embargo on the supply of arms and military equipment to Sierra Leone by its member states, and the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1132, which also imposed an arms embargo. However, Sandline, a British private military company, violated the UN arms embargo by providing arms and military equipment to the ECOWAS military forces and militias supporting the Kabbah administration. British government officials including British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone became involved in this violation of the UN economic sanctions. The Sandline Affair was caused by multiple factors. First, arms embargo sanctions against Sierra Leone included the UN Security Council resolution and other documents at various levels, and each was characterised by different sanction targets and criticism. This leads to ambiguity among the relevant parties in terms of their awareness of who or what was the target of the sanctions. Second, the awareness of British government officials about complying with UN sanctions and their implementation as well as their communication with each other was insufficient. Third, diverse military actors were involved in the conflict in Sierra Leone, including government troops, anti-government guerrillas, sub-regional military forces, militias, and private military companies. These diverse actors and the complexity of the relationships between them complicated understanding the targets of the UN sanctions of the arms embargo.

For at least a decade, die Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been engaged in armed efforts to terminate a secessionist movement on the island of Bougainville off the South East coast of the PNG mainland. In late 1996, the government agreed to hire the firm of Sandline International to provide mercenary assistance, in a desperate bid to regain effective control of Bougainville. In an ironical twist to the cycle of violence and missed opportunities for peaceful resolution of the conflict, the controversial decision to engage Sandline proved to be the very catalyst to facilitate a process which appears to offer a real prospect for a negotiated settlement to the dispute.The public disclosure of the decision of the then-Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, to resort to mercenarism was condemned by regional governments and resulted in widespread civil disturbance in PNG. Ultimately, the Chan Government was overthrown in a general election and the new government of Prime Minister Bill Skate has participated in the negotiation of an agreement to establish an independent Truce Monitoring Group and an end to me Bougainville conflict.

552Arbitration — Tribunal — Status — Distinction between international and domestic arbitration — Agreement between State and foreign company — Provision for UNCITRAL arbitration — Whether international arbitration — Applicable law — Public policyRelationship of international law and municipal law — Customary international law — As part of English law — Contract between State and foreign company — Contract governed by English law — Whether including international law — Principle that State cannot rely upon internal law to avoid international obligation — Whether exception to principle that courts will not enforce contract illegal by law of place of performanceState responsibility — Imputability — Ultra vires acts of officials — Acts in official capacity — Whether acts of the State — Contractual obligations of the State — Contract with foreign company — Whether international obligationsWar and armed conflict — Internal conflict — Government obtaining military assistance from foreign private company