Lebanon’s Corruption Crisis: An International Responsibility

February 24, 2021 by Digital Editor

Destroyed Grain Silos at Port in Beirut

By: Eliane Bejjani

February 4th marked the six month anniversary of the August 2020 blast in Beirut, which has been widely attributed to rampant government corruption and mismanagement.  The scars of the explosion are still visible across the cityscape, but the official investigation has so far gone nowhere.  Just a few days ago, a court removed the investigation’s head judge who had charged four top politicians, including the former prime minister, of criminal negligence.  For many, this was merely another confirmation that transparency and justice are hard to come by in a country as systemically corrupt as Lebanon.  The international community, perpetually involved in Lebanese affairs, shares the burden of fighting against this grand corruption it has helped nurture.

This shared responsibility for Lebanon’s complete collapse lies in the international structures and frameworks that have allowed Lebanese politicians to accumulate and spend ill-gotten wealth with impunity.  Global powers falsely diagnose Lebanon’s current state of affairs as a domestic problem to which they can offer no solutions and for which they shoulder no blame.  Corruption at the scale currently ravaging Lebanon requires international complicity; it requires deeper vaults than any in Lebanon, and a blind eye turned around the world.  Members of the international community have a duty to help the Lebanese clean the house built with foreign money.

Global Anti-Corruption Efforts

Corruption has emerged in recent years as the focal point of the international community’s battle against everything from financial system-threatening debt to security threats and atrocious human rights violations.  Treaties from the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) to the OECD’s Anti Bribery Convention attempt to address corruption – both petty and grand – head on.  Other bodies such as the IMF have factored corruption into their more generalized mandates,[1] understanding that good governance, transparency, and accountability are required for sustainable development and political, social, and economic stability.

Corruption’s international visibility has also been bolstered through in-country enforcement measures.  The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has increased in celebrity through high profile FCPA cases and investigations.  The UK’s Serious Fraud Office has prosecuted its own share of high-profile cases.  Together, these far-reaching enforcement mechanisms offer the most powerful and immediate means of targeting corruption around the world – indeed, sometimes much further than many would like.

But these treaties and enforcement mechanisms have done little for individuals living under the crushing weight of rapacious and shamelessly corrupt political classes, as the Lebanese situation demonstrates.  Treaties such as UNCAC, to which Lebanon is a signatory, operate via domestic laws.  International bodies such as the IMF interface with the very corrupt government officials whose actions they aim to curtail, and whose incentives are directly contrary to IMF compliance.  The real stakeholders, the citizens paying the price for their governments’ greed, are cut out of these discussions.  In terms of enforcement, the US has imposed Global Magnitsky Act (GloMag) sanctions on Gebran Bassil, most recently minister of foreign affairs and son-in-law of Lebanese President Michel Aoun, for systemic corruption.  But most countries have stressed that Lebanon must help itself regarding what they consider to be an essentially domestic issue.

International Responsibilities Vis A Vis Lebanon

While the domestic argument makes intuitive sense, particularly in Lebanon where elections are free (though perhaps not fair), such statements deliberately sidestep the incredible amount of foreign involvement in Lebanese internal politics and the responsibilities that should go with this.  Some of this involvement is benign in intention, though it can have pernicious effects.  Lebanon receives significant aid from international organizations due to its position as host to the largest number of refugees per capita in the world.  With this aid comes opportunities for profit that can be doled out to supporters and leveraged to reinforce networks of power.  After the August explosion, Beirut residents begged foreign leaders to provide desperately needed humanitarian aid not to the government but instead to independent agencies, knowing that citizens would likely see little of these funds once they had been split among political fiefdoms and gone through patronage networks.

But much of this international involvement is self-serving and parasitic.  International actors have long treated Lebanese politicians as their proxies or pawns, using foreign money to buy and bolster domestic clients.  These clients have returned the favor through interventions in regional power conflicts, which deepen internal Lebanese divisions.  Their international patronage has shielded them from local accountability while increasing the barriers to entry for any putative challengers.  Proxy wars have kept the country in a state of survival, where local plundering and regulation circumvention go unnoticed or shrugged at with cynical understanding.

GloMag targets the international sourcing and spending of corruption, and anti-money laundering frameworks have been strengthened.  But in so far as these mechanisms have been pursued with regards to Lebanon, they have had little effect.  In the short term, countries like the US and the UK should aggressively implement existing sanctions regimes against all corrupt politicians, not just the ones whose politics they disagree with.  Foreign countries should continue to channel aid directly into independent NGOs with proven track records.  The US and the European Union should leverage diplomatic relations with Gulf states and Jordan to hold a firm line against their former Lebanese clients, who will seek to lean into and play up regional rivalries – and their own importance within these – in order to escape accountability.

In the long run, the international community should consider a mechanism that allows citizens of systemically corrupt countries the means for disposing of their parasitic politicians.  An international anti-corruption court has been debated, and examples of its merits can be found here and here; its challenges here and here.  Better yet, the international community should fold grand corruption charges into the existing mandate of the International Criminal Court, or ICC.  The ICC already recognizes crimes against humanity, and GloMag specifically recognizes “significant corruption” under its “Human Rights Accountability Act.”  As the Beirut explosion has laid bare, corruption has a searing human cost.  With corruption a global business with global effects, this cost is not for one country to bear.


[1] The IMF has recently reinforced its focus on corruption and good governance as part of its established regulatory function.  IMF Surveillance as part of its conditionality agreements with loaning states now explicitly include governance and anti-corruption metrics.  This was in part due to the IMF staff’s realization that endemic governance issues had real economic costs that would impact loan agreements.  It was also linked to credibility issues the Fund was confronting after the Arab Spring had laid bare the corruption not included in previous IMF audits.


Eliane Bejjani is a 2L and Global Law Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, where she is also a Digital Editor on the Georgetown Journal of International Law, competitor in the Jessup Moot, and Treasurer of the American Constitution Society.  Previously, Eliane interned at UNAIDS in Geneva and New York where she worked on the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, volunteered with refugees in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and spent two years in the UAE and Saudi Arabia as a management consultant with Boston Consulting Group.