Press Briefing by UN COMPENSATION COMMISSION

 

After 12 years and 2.68 million claims processed, the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) had completed its work handling the claims of those who suffered damages during Iraq’s 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait, Joe Sills, Spokesman for the Commission, told correspondents this afternoon at a Headquarters press conference.

The UNCC, Mr. Sills said, was a subsidiary body of the Security Council established in 1991 to settle those claims.  It completed its work last week by approving the last four remaining reports of the Panel of Commissioners.  In its final meeting, it also awarded nearly $367 million to successful claimants, bringing the total it has awarded to about $52.5 billion.

Despite the large amount of claims and funds handled, the administration costs have only amounted to one tenth of one per cent of the value of the claims, or 0.69 per cent of the value of awards, he emphasized.

Following the conclusion of its claims-processing work, the Commission will continue to facilitate payments of awards to claimants with a small secretariat staff and to complete a number of residual tasks such as archiving, he continued.  It was anticipated that such work would end by 2007, but that was a decision for the Council to make.

Since 1993, over 2.68 million claims, seeking approximately $354 billion in compensation, had been resolved by the various panels of Commissioners, he said.  Approximately $19.2 billion dollars had been made available for distribution to successful claimants so far, with up to $200 million more to be available for distribution next month.

He said the compensation funds had come from Iraqi oil exports.  When those funds first became available in 1996, payment of claims due was set at 30 per cent of the value of those exports and soon after was reduced to 25 per cent.  Following Council resolution 1483 of 2003, the rate of payment was reduced to five per cent.  For the last 9 quarters payment had been regularized to $200 million per quarter.  The five per cent rate of payment was supposed to continue indefinitely, since most of the money awarded was still owed.

In response to correspondents’ questions, Mr. Sills said that the current Government of Iraq was responsible for reparations, even if the damages had been incurred under the regime of Sadam Hussein.  Under international law, reparations were the responsibility of a sovereign State, and a change in government made no difference.

Fairness was a completely different matter, he said, and he expected that the new Iraqi Government would try to renegotiate the matter bilaterally with Kuwait.  Any agreement they reached could then be taken to the Security Council.  Until now, however, the Iraqi Government had not acted to change the reparations arrangement.

The names of recipients of the awards could be found on the UNCC website, Mr. Sills said in reply to another question, even though there is no one consolidated list.  Asked if the Volker Commission was looking into the UNCC, he stressed that there was no connection between the Commission and the oil-for-food programme, although the Volcker Commission had interviewed some UNCC staff in Geneva.

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