09 September 1998
ADMINISTRATION SANCTIONS REFORM PLAN ENCOUNTERS OPPOSITION
(Eizenstat outlines proposal to Senate task force) (850) By Bruce Odessey USIA Staff Writer Washington -- A Clinton administration proposal for reforming legislative and executive procedures for imposing unilateral economic sanctions has run into opposition in the U.S. Senate. Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat outlined the proposal September 8 at a hearing of the special Senate task force on sanctions. He told reporters later that the presentation followed months of negotiations between his office and Senate staff members. Eizenstat said the administration based its proposal on the leading legislative proposal for sanctions reform, called the Lugar-Hamilton bill. But Republican Senator Richard Lugar criticized the administration proposal and what he viewed as weak support for the bill he has cosponsored. "The administration has pretty well frustrated our purposes," Lugar said. But with the current session of Congress drawing to a close, the senator said supporters of his bill just might accept much of the administration proposal. "The better part of valor may be to find out what the administration is willing to support," he said. Eizenstat promised the senators he would work to resolve their remaining differences. Later he told reporters that even if Congress does not pass the bill in the current session, a consensus achieved now would allow passage early in the next session. His sense was that the task force would impart "a new burst of energy" for sanctions reform. The Lugar-Hamilton bill has broad support from business and agriculture groups, but strong and emotional opposition from groups that favor use of unilateral sanctions against human rights and other abuses. Both the Lugar-Hamilton bill and the administration proposal would apply only prospectively, not to existing sanctions. Both would require cost-benefit analysis before new sanctions could be imposed either by new legislation passed by Congress or by executive order under existing legislation, specifically the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But the administration proposal departs in critical procedural ways from the Lugar-Hamilton bill. For example, it would have Congress make itself, but not the administration, subject to the bill's restrictions; the administration would apply parallel restrictions to itself by executive order instead. Eizenstat argued that because Congress can always exempt itself from Lugar-Hamilton restrictions by passing another bill, the administration should have the same kind of flexibility. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican chairman of the task force, viewed the proposal as giving the administration too much power. "While all congressional sanctions procedures would be a matter of statute," McConnell said, "the administration would be subject to executive order or presidential policy directive, which is somewhat easier to overturn, reverse or modify on short notice." Another difference between Congress and the administration concerns presidential waivers for sanctions. Each existing sanctions law has a different standard the president must meet to waive sanctions. Eizenstat said the administration wants a single, broadly defined national interest standard for all waivers. He said, however, the administration would consider a Senate proposal for two standards, placing a tougher national security standard on waivers of sanctions against weapons proliferation. He said the administration also opposed other details of the Lugar-Hamilton bill. For example, a provision for ending sanctions after two years would not work for long-term problems like weapons proliferation, drug trafficking and terrorism, he said. "We should not give the targets of such sanctions the ability to wait us out," Eizenstat said. Similarly, he said, a requirement on the president to announce sanctions 45 days in advance would not always work. "Telegraphing in advance our intention to seize the assets of suspected terrorists, narcotics traffickers, major international criminals ... would effectively rule out asset freezes as a foreign policy tool," he said. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott formed the Senate Task Force on Economic Sanctions in June comprising eight Democrats and eight Republicans, including both reformers like Lugar and advocates of sanctions like Senator Jesse Helms (sponsor of the Helms-Burton law) and Senator Alfonse D'Amato (sponsor of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act). The original September 1 deadline for the task force to report back to the Senate had already passed when it held its first hearings September 8 and 9. Chairman McConnell has announced no new deadline for the report. In July the Senate defeated 53-46 an attempt to add the Lugar-Hamilton proposal as an amendment to an agriculture appropriations bill, but some senators indicated then they could switch their votes depending on the task force report. In a related development, the independent U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) reported September 8 that it has identified 142 statutory provisions imposing unilateral economic sanctions in 42 separate federal U.S. laws. The report prepared for a House of Representatives committee also identified 27 state and local laws imposing unilateral sanctions as well as 14 more proposed concerning human rights practices in Burma, Cuba, Nigeria and Tibet and foreign banks' holding money of Holocaust victims. The USITC found estimates for U.S. exports foregone annually because of unilateral sanctions ranging from $5,000 million to $20,000 million.
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