Bern appoints UK adviser who opposed Iraq war

The Swiss government names British lawyer Elizabeth Wilmshurst to an arbitration panel meant to resolve a dispute with Libya over the Geneva arrest of Muammar Gaddafi's son and wife last year. Wilmshurst, famous for resigning from the Foreign Office because she felt the Iraq war was unlawful, joins a tribunal whose legal basis is being hotly challenged by Genevan authorities. A former legal adviser to the UK government who quit the Foreign Office because of her opposition to the war in Iraq was named by the Swiss government to an international arbitration tribunal aimed at ending a diplomatic rift with Libya.
Bern on Sunday named British lawyer Elizabeth Wilmshurst as the Swiss-designated arbitrator on a three-person panel to investigate the arrest of the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his wife in Geneva last summer.
 
The federal government issued a statement that said Wilmshurst “enjoys a wide reputation as an experienced and independent expert on international law,” noting that she served as deputy legal adviser in Britain’s Foreign Office from 1999 to 2003.

But Wilmshurst, 60, is most famous for quitting her job at Whitehall in 2003 after 29 years with the government because she “did not agree the use of force against Iraq was lawful, and in all the circumstances I did not want to continue as a legal adviser.”

She is now a lecturer in international law at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London and a visiting professor at University College London. Wilmshurst could not be reached immediately for comment. (She later sent Swisster an email that said:

"I am afraid that it would be inappropriate for me to give any comment on the arbitration.")

Libya has yet to appoint a member to the tribunal. According to an agreement signed on August 20 in Tripoli, both Switzerland and Libya must designate an independent third country jurist to the panel.

The two chosen arbitrators must then jointly choose the third member of the tribunal, to be located in London. Once assembled, the body will have 60 days to examine the circumstances of the arrest in July 2008 of Hannibal Gaddafi and his wife at the Hotel President Wilson.

The arrest led to a severing of bilateral relations between the two countries and the detention in Libya of two Swiss employees, one each from offices of Nestlé and engineering firm ABB, which were closed.

The decision to establish the tribunal was part of a package of concessions made by the Swiss government to appease the Libyans, including a personal apology delivered by Switzerland’s president Hans-Rudolf Merz to Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi for the “unjust arrest” of the Gaddafis.

Libya agreed to release the two Swiss employees by September 1 but a plane dispatched to collect the pair returned last week without them.

Bern’s response, meantime, has drawn fierce criticism from the Geneva government, which maintains the arbitration panel goes against Swiss law.

George Joffe, a Libya expert from the University of Cambridge, told Swisster last week that the Libyans themselves are probably having second thoughts about the tribunal that Wilmshurst has been appointed to. The Geneva government will not accept the tribunal’s findings and its recommendations will be unenforceable, Joffe said.

But Wilmshurst is no stranger to controversy. With regard to the Iraq war, she took issue with the legality of the invasion – led by the US but supported by Britain with the largest number of troops of any other nation – without a supporting resolution from the United Nations Security Council.

She resigned from the Foreign Office after Lord Goldsmith, then Britain’s attorney general, reversed her legal opinion of the war, although her precise reasons for stepping down were not made public until two years later.

An associate fellow in international law at Chatham House, Wilmshurst lists "consular and diplomatic law" among her areas of expertise. She also includes international criminal and humanitarian law, the United Nations and "state and sovereign immunity."

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