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Guest post by Drieu Godefridi<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stubbornly refuses <\/a>to go along with the latest absurd idea from the EU bureaucracy: seizing Russia\u2019s assets in Belgium to offer them to Ukraine. Politico scolds <\/a>him, claiming he is \u201charder to convince than Trump\u201d (the ultimate embodiment of evil, apparently). The United Nations Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States (Article 21) guarantees <\/a>the protection of central bank assets when used for non-commercial purposes. Article 5 is unequivocal: \u201cA State enjoys, for itself and its property, immunity from the jurisdiction of the courts of another State.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA) require <\/a>that any \u201ccountermeasure\u201d be proportionate, reversible, and aimed at resolving a dispute \u2014 not destroying an economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, the aim has never truly been the \u201creconstruction of Ukraine,\u201d despite the protestations of the pale apparatchiks in the Berlaymont \u2014 headquarters of Ms. von der Leyen\u2019s European Commission. The actual objective is to fund Ukraine\u2019s war effort. In plain terms: a de facto act of war by little Belgium against imperial Russia. Even the authors most favourable to confiscation acknowledge <\/a>that such assets could only, under international law, be used for reconstruction \u2014 never to finance warfare (Csongor Istv\u00e1n Nagy, International Investment Law Enables the Use of Frozen Russian Assets to Compensate for War Damage in Ukraine<\/em>, Harvard International Law Journal, 15 November 2023).<\/p>\n\n\n\n All international financial transactions rely on trust, since there is no sovereign arbiter above states. Shattering that trust would unleash a financial crisis that would devastate Europe and the global financial system. Europeans fail to grasp that between their current comfort and poverty lie merely two or three disastrous decisions \u2014 precisely the sort the EU excels at making. Our fellow citizens behave as though supermarket abundance were part of the laws of nature, an eternal constant. But when you\u2019ve been living on credit for fifty years, caution is essential. Europe is a leaking financial submarine, and von der Leyen proposes that we throw the hatches wide open \u2014 apparently to \u201cbreathe easier.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every state on the planet would instantly understand that the theft of Russian assets paves the way for the theft of their own, under whatever pretext might be found. One can picture the delight of the Berlaymont\u2019s creatures fantasising about seizing the assets of China, India, the United States, and others, in the name of \u201cinsufficient climate efforts,\u201d for instance. Two hundred countries, two hundred portfolios \u2014 a banquet for crazed bureaucrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The BRICS central banks would pull their reserves out of Western institutions within a week. The euro would become toxic as a reserve currency, and would collapse \u2014 for it is not backed by genuine industrial might, but merely by the fading remnants of the rule of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Europe is already financially drained after its economic suicide, pompously named the \u201cGreen Deal.\u201d Desperate to keep their crumbling system alive a few months more, the EU\u2019s bureaucrats are ready to seize anything within reach. But the rest of the world is not blind. It sees. It understands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this is without even considering that such a seizure would be treated by Russia as an act of war, triggering massive retaliatory measures and a cascade of lawsuits \u2014 lawsuits Moscow would almost certainly win, because the theft of sovereign assets is, under international law, a crime. In the best-case<\/em> scenario for Belgium, the country would be ordered to return \u20ac150 billion to Russia immediately. But alas \u2014 the billions would have already been sent to Ukraine, and already \u201cspent\u201d. Who would reimburse Moscow? And interest would keep mounting. Belgium would become a financial vassal of Russia for a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The lessons from this episode are clear:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This raises a burning question: should Ms. von der Leyen and her band of vandals remain at the helm of the European Union?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A question Mr. Bart De Wever \u2014 whose ECR group in the European Parliament supports the von der Leyen Commission \u2014 would do well to ponder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of<\/em> The Green Reich<\/a> (2020).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is good analysis by a legal scholar. https:\/\/www.thegatewaypundit.com\/2025\/10\/robbing-russia-is-von-der-leyen-stupid-insane\/ Guest post by Drieu Godefridi Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stubbornly refuses to go along with the latest absurd idea from the EU bureaucracy: seizing Russia\u2019s assets in Belgium to offer them to Ukraine. Politico scolds him, claiming he is \u201charder to convince than Trump\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14040,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14039\/revisions\/14040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Confiscating Russia\u2019s sovereign assets in Belgium would indeed be an act of sheer folly. Even during the Second World War, no such step was taken. After Pearl Harbor, for example, President Roosevelt froze Japanese assets \u2014 he did not steal them. Never in history have non-belligerent countries seized the central-bank assets of a belligerent state during wartime in order to finance the reconstruction of a third country (source<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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