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In the aftermath of the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the UN Security Council determined that Iraq was liable under international law for any direct damage resulting from its unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait. The United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) was established to process the claims against Iraq. Since 1991, the UNCC has received approximately 2.6 million claims, which it has subdivided in six categories, depending on the status of the claimant, the type of loss, and the amount claimed. For certain claims, the UNCC has established fixed compensation standards, rather than assessing the exact amount of the loss. Other innovative features include mass claims resolution techniques and methodologies such as data matching, grouping, and sampling. The reparation process was funded through oil exports under the oil-for-food program. A share of originally 30% and later 25% of the proceeds was reserved for compensation. The oil-for-food program was terminated after the new war in Iraq in 2003, and the share of oil revenues dedicated to reparation was lowered to 5%. As of June 2005, the UNCC has decided nearly all claims.

Most commentators on the work of the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) agree that the Commission and its law-making record were rather unique in international law, both in terms of institutional and procedural characteristics, and in terms of the substantive legal rules applied. Within the Commission's range of work in turn, there is a distinct segment that stands apart from the general context of the UNCC ‘regime’; namely the system of compensation for environmental claims, referred to as the ‘F4’ category. This chapter seeks to clarify the question as to why and how, or to what extent, the rules applied to environmental claims were indeed different, or sui generis, as compared with the rest of the UNCC. It is only after this kind of analytic clarification that the ulterior question can be asked as to whether the UNCC/F4 experience may hold any precedential lessons for other claims proceedings in the future.

This chapter provides an overview of the processing and valuation of the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) environmental claims. The discussion is preliminary in nature since the Panel of Commissioners tasked with reviewing environmental claims has not yet issued any recommendations on 107 claims for monitoring and assessment of environmental losses in March 2001, and plans to issue its reports and recommendations by December 2004.

This chapter critically assesses the usefulness of a jus post bellum as a freshly discussed third pillar of international peace and security law with regard to a state’s duty to pay reparations for an unlawful resort to force. Based on the analysis of the relevant practice—starting from the Versailles reparations regime after the First World War and ending with the work of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission at the beginning of the twenty-first century—this chapter identifies a systemic gap in the current legal framework governing the aggressor state’s reparations obligation. While the principle of full reparation is one of the fundamental premises to the law of state responsibility and firmly enshrined in customary international law, there is a recurring practice in the aftermath of armed conflicts to consider the severity of the aggressor state’s wrongdoing and its economic capacity in determining the adequate reparations sum. The chapter concludes that this practice, which reflects the unique peacebuilding function of reparations in a post bellum society, can be best addressed by developing and applying a jus post bellum principle of proportionality to the aggressor state’s reparations obligation.

This chapter considers two implications for public international law of the model developed in chapter 5 for distributing state responsibility. First, it critically examines the landmark United Nations Compensation Commission, which extracted compensation from Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War. It shows that this scheme was not sufficiently sensitive to Iraq’s authoritarian regime characteristics and imposed unfair burdens on ordinary citizens. It then examines solutions that should have been used instead. Second, it assesses the implications for the idea of state punishment. Focusing on two influential justifications of punishment—the expressive view and the duties to victim’s view—it demonstrates how the proposed framework should shape the way we punish states.