Biden Blocking Afghan Financial Assets Amounts to 'Economic Warfare' - Human Rights Lawyer

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - President Joe Biden's move to retain $7 billion of Afghan Central Bank assets in the New York Federal Reserve is an illegal form of economic warfare that is starving the people of Afghanistan, University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle told Sputnik.

On Friday, Biden signed an executive order to allow $7 billion in Afghan Central Bank funds deposited in the US to be split between a humanitarian trust and compensation to terror victims.

"They [Biden administration] are going to try to satisfy public opinion by saying they are using it for humanitarian purposes and giving it out step by step. But it is just practicing economic warfare against the people of Afghanistan," Boyle said. "It is calibrated to buy time and be ineffective. They are brutally starving these poor people to death."

Boyle said the Biden administration had no right to arbitrarily seize the Afghan government assets.

"It is outright thievery for the Biden Administration to give these Afghanistan Central Bank assets to United States citizens for any reason," he said. "The Biden Administration is proceeding in bad faith here."

The lawyer said, according to Article II (c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Biden administration’s economic warfare against Afghanistan verges on genocidal by "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

The Taliban* movement sees the US decision to freeze Afghan funds held in US banks as a showcase of theft and the moral decline of the United States, Mohammad Naeem, a spokesman for the Taliban political office said.

*The Taliban is a terrorist organisation outlawed in Russia and many other states