Burhan Rashid, a member of the legal committee in the Kurdistan regional parliament, told Al-Monitor that the government sent the parliament two laws for amendment, and they [the MPs] saw the need to make the amendments and allow foreign lawyers with rare specializations to work in the region.
Moreover, he affirmed that the amendments will be added following instructions from the Iraqi Kurdistan Bar Association.
He added, “After this amendment, the bar association must issue instructions, within three weeks, according to which two-thirds of the members of the association’s board must vote in favor of any foreign lawyer who wants to practice law in the region. Moreover, the lawyer’s specialization must be rare and non-existent in the region, and the association must review the region’s need for specializations every two years.”
Rashid confirmed that the rare specializations in Kurdistan are: “model contracts, oil and investment contracts and contracts related to norms and international trade. With this, their work will be restricted to specific fields and rare specializations.”
In this context, oil expert Wajid Shaker asserted that “international oil companies cannot rely on a lawyer who has no experience in oil contracts or in the oil, gas and investment fields. Moreover, this does not only apply to lawyers, but also to economists who haven’t worked in the oil field and who do not know anything about oil contracts, which have their own specifications.”
Shaker added that even the local and civil courts are not responsible for deciding on special disputes in oil contracts. In fact, there are international trade courts in some global capitals that specialize in settling such disputes between oil companies and contractual parties.
Shaker stated, “Whether a foreigner or a national, if the lawyer does not have a specialization in the field of oil, he cannot look into oil matters.”
Abdel Hamid Zebari is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Iraq Pulse. A reporter from Erbil who works in print and radio, he has published in local and international media, including Agence France-Press and Radio Free Iraq (Radio Free Europe).
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