College of Law and Politics at the University of Human Development (UHD) has held a panel on the recent arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce's International Court of Arbitration in Paris over a long-running dispute over the Kurdistan Region’s independent exportation of its crude oil to the international market through Turkey.

The Iraqi government has long argued that it should have sole power over Kurdistan Region’s oil and energy and agree on sharing its revenue with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Iraq brought the case against Turkey in 2014 after KRG started pumping its oil through a transit pipeline going through Turkey.

Bagdad’s position was supported by Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court last year which ruled that Kurdistan’s independent sale of oil was unconstitutional.  The Paris court’s arbitration came as another and bigger support for the Iraqi government, and this time Turkey was obliged to comply with the ruling. Turkey stopped shipping crude oil from Kurdistan Region right after the Paris ruling.

This forced KRG to resort to an immediate agreement with Baghdad to let the Iraqi state-owned Organisation for Marketing of Oil (SOMO) control selling its crude oil to buyers in the international market.

Today, 5th April, in a panel, three well-informed lecturers discussed this issue and analysed the political and economic ramifications of this development for Kurdistan and the wider region. They were Dr Twana Abdulrahman and Mr Kardo Karim, both from the College of Law and Politics at UHD, and Dr Tariq Kaka-Rash, a previous lecturer at the same college at UHD and currently at Kirkuk University.