by Мастер » Fri Feb 26, 2021 2:07 pm
Well the Soviets started keeping their money in places where they thought the Americans couldn't get it in the 1950s, if not earlier. I'm sure they advised the North Koreans to do the same, if the latter hadn't already passed that particular intelligence test.
If they still hadn't gotten the message, the seizure of Iranian assets in the late 1970s or early 1980s should have been a wake-up call.
When Nicaragua won that judgement against the US at the ICJ, the US announced that they disagreed with the verdict and were therefore just going to ignore it, and Nicaragua had precisely zero luck collecting. Well, maybe. When a friendly (to Washington) government came into power in Managua, they effectively cancelled the debt. Now why did the only country in the Western Hemisphere that might actually be poorer than Haiti decline to collect a large amount of money from Washington? I'm only speculating here, but perhaps their allies in Washington were providing significant aid, although maybe less than they would have provided had the Soviet government not had its going-out-of-business sale. But if they did, then maybe the US in effect did pay the judgement in the form of military or other aid to Nicaragua, they simply had it relabelled so it didn't say "this is money the US owes Nicaragua because the ICJ found the US guilty of terrorism".
US courts have, bizarrely, found Iran responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I don't think anyone has been able to collect anything based on that judgement, but I might be mistaken there.
The State Department is no doubt advising the president (who may or may not listen - the last one wasn't exactly a listening sort of guy) that enforcing collection of the debt may not be a precedent the US really wants to set. Does the US really want families of prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib to win judgements in Iraqi courts, and then collect from the US? How about prisoners held without charge for close to two decades now in Gitmo? Prisoners waterboarded, or killed in US custody during "enhanced interrogation"? After eight years of unapologetic unilateralism, followed by eight years of apologetic unilateralism, then another four years of unapologetic unilateralism (and then whatever we've got now), it might not be too hard to get judgements against the US in other countries' courts. I can't be arsed to look up the details right now, but didn't the US government stop collection on judgements against Saudi Arabia? The government can't really control what the courts do, but they can stop the collection.
Will every Indian tribe in the US start preparing their legal briefs if the US decides that court judgements against sovereign nations should be enforced?
They call me Mr Celsius!