Belgium Criminalizes Investing in Cluster Munitions

Although it is still unclear whether cluster munitions violate Additional Protocol I’s prohibition of attacks that “employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective,” Belgium — so often on the cutting edge of international criminal law — isn’t waiting to find out. On Thursday, the Belgian Senate passed a law that would criminalize investing in any company that manufactures the munitions:

“The financial groups which invest in or finance (cluster bomb manufacturers) will be outlawed,” Socialist Senator Philippe Mahoux told Reuters on Friday.

This move followed a pledge in Oslo last week by 46 countries to work for a treaty next year to ban the bombs, which have killed thousands of civilians around the world.

Belgium’s law, approved by the upper house, specified that a list of manufacturers would be published by parliament, Mahoux said. It would prohibit banks from offering credit to cluster bomb makers and from owning shares or bonds in these companies.

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Belgian banking group KBC has already established a blacklist of weapons manufacturers which it believes make cluster bombs or mines and excluded them from all investments.

Fortis, another Belgian banking group, said it stopped investing in firms that produced the weapons in 2005.

Although an international treaty would obviously be more effective, it is unclear whether the political will exists to adopt one. 46 States recently signed the Oslo Declaration, vowing to outlaw cluster munitions by the end of 2008, but Japan, Poland and Romania refused to sign the declaration, while Israel and the United States did not take part in the conference that drafted it. Cluster munitions, moreover, remain big business: as the article notes, banks in Australia, the European Union, Switzerland and the United States provided more than $12 billion to the six main producers of the munitions between 2004 to 2007.

Earlier this month, Senators Feinstein and Leahy introduced the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act, which would “restrict federal funds for the use, sale or transfer of cluster bombs unless specified that they will be used only against clearly defined military targets and not where civilians are known to be present (or in areas normally inhabited by civilians).” The bill would also prohibit cluster munitions with a failure rate greater than 1%. A similar bill failed last September, when Republicans still controlled Congress.