30 April 2020, NIICE Commentary 4411
Dr. B. R. Deepak
As the fatalities caused by the COVID-19 climb to 228,239 (as on 30 April 2020) around the world and the liberal international order and institutions of global governance established by the Western powers fail to serve the humanity, the western camp has clamored for seeking hefty compensation from China for “concealing” the outbreak of Coronavirus from the outside world. The calls are becoming louder with escalating fatalities and failure of the Western countries to contain the virus.
On 4th April, the Henry Jackson Society, a British foreign policy think-tank, advocated that since China has directly breached international healthcare treaty responsibilities, therefore, China should be taken to the international courts for £351 billion (USD 449 billion) in Coronavirus compensation. The think tank also claimed that the G7, the world’s leading economies, face a bill of £3.2 trillion (USD 6.3 trillion). This was followed by Germany’s largest tabloid, the Bild seeking a compensation of 149 billion euros from China. In the US, American lawyer Larry Klayman’s Freedom Watch along with Texas company Buzz Photos have filed USD 20 trillion lawsuit against Chinese authorities in the US over Coronavirus. A Miami-based Berman Law Group has also filed a lawsuit seeking billions of dollars in compensation from China. On 27th April, the US President, Donald Trump also clamored by saying that he could bill China for the damages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some of the developing countries have also joined the chorus seeking compensation. Oby Ezekwesili, a Nigerian chartered accountant wrote in The Washington Post on 17th April that “China should immediately announce a complete write-off of more than USD 140 billion that its government, banks and contractors extended to countries in Africa between 2000 and 2017. This would provide partial compensation to African countries for the impact that the Coronavirus is already having on their economies and people.” On 14th April, a Mumbai based Indian lawyer filed a petition in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands seeking a total of USD 2.5 trillion in damages for India. Similar bills could be raised by other countries in the coming days.
Therefore, is it the ‘Gengzinian’ (year 1900) moment for the Western countries namely Russia, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Japan, United States, Italy, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway forced China to pay millions of dollars to them in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion?
First of all, the very logic for compensation is indefensible in any court of law. One, did China notify the WHO in time? It did so in December, and on 11th January, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded the entire genome sequence of five new Coronaviruses to the website, sharing its information with the world and the WHO. Did China share the information that human to human transmission of the epidemic was possible? Yes, it did on 20th January when Dr. Zhong Nanshan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering said in a television interview that it is a virus based on human-to-human transmissible. Did China block down the epicenter of pandemic, Wuhan? Yes, it did on 24th January. Did the virus in Europe and the US spread from China? Some in the West have argued that regular direct flights from Wuhan continued to run to London, Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco throughout January and in some cases into February, whereas the fact is that they stopped from 23rd January itself except some carriers airlifting their citizens from Wuhan at request. Did other countries get enough time to take precautions and adopt measures? Yes, they did get over two months’ time. Therefore, even if China tried to cover up the pandemic during its initial stage to ‘save face’ by hushing up the ‘rumor mongers’, the seriousness and swift action it took thereafter, should have been an eye opener to other countries.
Secondly, in the history of epidemics no country has ever been blamed and asked to pay indemnity. For example, AIDS originated in the US, did the US compensate people who were infected by it across the globe? H1N1 or the swine flu that originated in Mexico and killed millions worldwide, did countries sue Mexico for compensation? Similar is the case with Ebola and Mers and the list continues.
Thirdly, look who is asking for indemnities? The same countries who forced China to pay an indemnity of USD 21 million in the wake of the Opium War (1841); USD 19 million to France and Britain after the Second Opium War (1860), USD 333 million (the then exchange rate) to eight nations in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. Besides, many coastal areas were ceded to the Foreign powers. Hong Kong and Macao were returned to China only in the year 1997 and 1999 by the UK and Portugal respectively. Many areas in mainland China were turned into foreign enclaves by the US and European powers in the wake of the Opium Wars and remained so until the end of the Second World War.
If China suffered a century of humiliation, India suffered the humiliation of two centuries. India’s GDP accounted for around 27 percent of the world’s economy prior to British colonization, but was reduced to only 3 percent when the British left India. In October 2019 while addressing the Atlantic Council in Washington DC, India’s Minister of External Affairs, Dr. S. Jaishankar quoting a study stated that the wealth British took from India was close to USD 45 trillion in today’s monetary value. And what about the loss of life in wars, the starvation the colonizers subjected Indian people to. The 1943 famine of Bengal caused an estimated death of 2-3 million people. The situation in other colonies was no different. No wonder that Europe’s share of the world’s GDP jumped from 20 percent to 60 percent.
Fourthly, can the judicial institution of sovereign states exercise jurisdiction over other states? Obviously, China will pronounce the judgements as trash of papers as it did over a South China Sea litigation with the Philippines. Moreover, can the unintentional transmission by individuals regarded as the action of a state? If so, what about the transmission of other epidemics that originated in different parts of the world.
Fifthly, if we see the timing of these petitions, most of these have been filed in during the first and second week of April. Why not in January and February if these organizations believed China was the culprit? The petitioners are also well aware that it would be extremely difficult to hold China responsible for the spread of the pandemic, therefore, the whole exercise is to stigmatize China and nothing else. Furthermore, it is also to score political points and disguise their own incompetence in handling the pandemic by shifting blame on others.
Finally, as there are various conspiracy theories making rounds, including the one that COVID-19 in an outcome of the biological weapon program of China, one need to wait for the outcome of the ‘serious investigations’ being conducted by the Trump administration into China’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak, until then, the countries across the globe need to come together and fight this pandemic unitedly for the sake of humanity.
