North Korea, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are just a few of the countries currently subjected to sanctions imposed by other countries or international bodies. In all of their various forms, sanctions have long had a bad reputation for both failing to achieve results and for causing much more suffering to the vulnerable civilian populations they ostensibly aim to protect than to the political and economic leaders they target. However, despite this widely held negative view, sanctions are increasingly being used.
On the one hand, this may simply mean that – given the considerable difficulty in reaching consensus on the desirability or necessity of applying force and mustering the political will required to implement on the ground that which has been adopted in a more or less strongly worded text – it is necessary to curb ambitions and opt for one of the existing modalities of sanctions in an attempt to resolve situations that threaten international peace and security.
On the other hand, the increasing use of sanctions can be viewed as the result of an increasingly widespread belief that, when well defined and implemented, they can be an effective instrument among a wide range of available means for solving problems posed by countries that violate international norms, as well as by non-state groups and individuals implicated in systematic violations of human rights, terrorist activities or illicit trade.
The perception that the negative impacts of sanctions are not well considered is also likely due to the poor record of those approved up through the second half of the 1990s.
Redefining sanctions: less collateral damage?
It should be noted that, in their initial and longest phase, sanctions essentially consisted exclusively of the imposition of embargos against certain countries (those imposed against Rhodesia by the United Nations Security Council and against Cuba by the United States serve as classic examples). Structural blockages resulting from the tensions between Moscow and Washington, along with a greater inclination towards the use of force during the Cold War, meant that the Security Council imposed sanctions on only two occasions over that more than forty-year period (Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977). These were indiscriminate sanctions, as were those occasionally used by the European Economic Community and, more frequently, by countries like the United States, which ended up causing much more suffering to the population while failing, in the vast majority of cases, to punish rulers targeted for bad behaviour.
However, it is important to recognise that, while total success has still not been achieved and unwanted side effects that disproportionately punish the civilian population have not been completely avoided, significant changes have since been made to both the methods used and the objectives pursued.
Sanctions today – which the UN has placed on Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others, and the EU has placed on Belarus, Burma, Burundi, China, Egypt, the United States, Haiti, Russia and others – are intended to be coercive measures applied to governments, non-state groups and even individuals whose activities present a threat to peace. Above all, they are designed to resolve conflicts, avoid the proliferation of arms, fight terrorism, promote democracy and respect for human rights and, more recently, protect civilians. They are also no longer solely limited to forcing a change in their targets’ behaviour (coercing), but also serve to reduce their capacity to manoeuvre (constraining) and publicly denounce them (signalling). As a preliminary option or a substitute for the use of force, they range from the embargoes mentioned above to restrictions on the movements of designated persons outside of the country in question, the prohibition of import-export trade activities, and financial measures (including freezing bank assets). Ideally, sanctions seek to maximise the impact on certain actors while minimising effects on others. And, while economic measures are generally used, the motivation behind them is always political.
To this end, the UN, which has approved 14 sanctions regimes since the end of the Cold War, uses articles 39 and 41 of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The European Union, which has applied sanctions on 35 occasions since the Maastricht Treaty entered into force in 1993 (14 are simply implementations of those adopted by the UN, six others add complementary sanctions to those previously adopted, and another 14 are specific to the EU), defines them as a legal instrument of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (included in Article 21 of the Treaty on European Union and Article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), requiring unanimous approval by the European Council. Beginning with Iran in 1979, the United States has applied sanctions more than 50 times, either on the initiative of Congress or of the White House. On several occasions, it has abused its actual power by trying to impose its own standards extraterritorially with the aim of punishing third parties.
If we only take into consideration the handful of times that sanctions have been used successfully to radically modify the behaviour of targeted actors, and the undeniable costs that occasionally exceed the supposed benefits, the immediate temptation would be to demand that they be eliminated.
But doing so would mean losing an instrument that, in all of its forms, is necessary for the international community to improve levels of compliance with the rules that govern the world. Without them, we would be forced to rely solely on diplomatic efforts or be condemned to the use of force, which should be seen as a means of last resort. We must also remember that, on their own, sanctions can hardly be expected to bring about changes in behaviour; however, as recent experience has taught us, their objective should be to contribute to a greater or lesser extent to protecting the values and principles laid out by international law, to peace, to the consolidation of democratic systems and the rule of law, and to full respect for human rights.
It is of course true that sanctions must be adapted in order to find a better balance between punishment on the one hand, and procedural and legal guarantees for people directly affected by them on the other. Likewise, improving systems of approval and implementation is essential to achieving the greatest possible consensus and preventing the creation of loopholes that allow offenders to benefit from the imposition of sanctions. This also means accepting that there is no universally valid system of sanctions and that it will be necessary to precisely analyse which modality can achieve the best results and how long their application is expected in each individual case. It is above all necessary to prevent at all costs sanctions from having indiscriminate humanitarian effects. Offenders must be unequivocally identified and the rights of the rest of the population explicitly protected.
Unfortunately, as we wait for these proposed reforms to be implemented, there are still examples, such as those in Venezuela or Iran at present, which seem to be moving in the wrong direction. Without defending the actions of the leaders of these countries, it becomes clear that what is being passed off as simple sanctions are in fact a thinly veiled strategy of harassment with the goal of overthrowing their respective governments, while punishing the civilian population in the midst of a pandemic. While it is clear that Washington is the main driver behind such actions, other governments (including the European Union) are guilty of failing to call out its behaviour while presenting themselves as sincere defenders of international law and human rights and, whether by action or omission, failing to meet their commitments.
