Sanctions are weapons, and like any other wartime invention, they have changed over time to become more powerful and more precise. The U.S. example of this evolution of force, as in so many other cases (nuclear weapons, military aircraft), is particularly instructive. Sanctions expert for the Economist Group Agathe Demarais, in a 2023 interview for NPR, notes that a mere 13% of U.S. sanctions since 1970 worked as intended, and although they have grown more sophisticated — from the imprecise and unsuccessful 1960 trade embargo against Cuba to the 2003 financial sanctioning of banks collaborating with North Korea, and finally to the individual targeting of several Russian businessmen listed as the 100-richest Russians in 2018 — they still tend to inflict a shotgun pattern of harm, affecting the innocent as well as the guilty of the sanctioned countries.

Unintended Effects

Even when sanctions accomplish their foreign-policy goals, they can still crush the populations in those sanctioned countries. The 2012 U.S. financial sanctions against Iran helped secure a more moderate political regime and reign in the country’s nuclear program. Consumer prices also rose by 30% and living standards fell dramatically, crippling Iran’s COVID-19 response and inflating the pandemic’s death toll in the country into the hundreds of thousands. A combination of financial and oil sanctions against Venezuela in 2017 contributed to a 1 million percent rise in inflation in a country already plagued by shortages of food, medicine and sometimes even the basic materials Venezuelans needed to bury their dead relatives.

Franciso Rodriguez of the Josef School for International Studies, writing for the Financial Times in May 2023, cites studies showing sanctions inflicting Great Depression levels of economic harm on countries and slashing 1.4 years off the life expectancy of their female citizens. Like a tactical nuclear weapon, sanctions can become technically more precise in hitting their target, but the fallout that follows is still diffuse, destructive and often fatal.

Gaps in the Wall

Thankfully, international efforts by both governments and humanitarian organizations to relieve the strain sanctions often imposed upon already desperate populations came to fruition on December 9, 2022, when The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted SCR 2664. The resolution, introduced by the U.S. and Ireland, allows “funds and assets necessary for humanitarian assistance and activities to meet basic human needs” to cut through existing or future U.N. financial sanctions. Efforts to provide disaster relief, medical supplies, education and even general “peacebuilding” and development could now be granted licenses by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control. This gradual thawing trend in the imposition of sanctions precedes SCR 2664 when in December 2021 the UNSC adopted measures allowing humanitarian aid to cut through its financial sanctions on Afghanistan.

Brick by Brick: The Way Forward

There is still much work to be done. Outside of actual criminality, NGOs and foreign aid organizations must still operate within the confines that sanctions set in sanctioned countries. Until public pressure convinced President Biden to grant limited exceptions, attempts to help the victims of the deadly February earthquakes in Syria and Turkey were stymied by American sanctions against those nations, with donation sites like GoFundMe cooperating by actively scouring mention of the disaster from their websites.

As for progressive measures like SCR2664, Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, writing for Chatham House Institute in 2022, was careful to point out that there are exceptions to the exceptions because they apply only to financial sanctions. Provisions like food and equipment for removing landmines must still pass through an arduous process of authorization before they can reach many countries. Starving nations like North Korea, already encircled by a variety of trade restrictions, are especially cut off.

It is incumbent upon all humanitarian organizations, and the ordinary people who support their work, to continue to lobby for humanitarian avenues that cut through sanctions. It appears there is a need for organizations to educate themselves on the current state of these exceptions, especially in countries that may superficially seem beyond the reach of humanitarian assistance. For instance, Russia’s war with Ukraine has not completely isolated it from Western assistance, as illustrated in a 2023 OFAC fact sheet which lists in detail every U.S. and U.K. humanitarian license and exception for aid and export to and from Russia.

– John Merino
Photo: Flickr