Sanctions in the era of pandemic

Millions of people in the United States have long known what it is like not to be able to buy food, or soap, or toilet paper. The UN Human Rights Council determined that economic sanctions “can have far-reaching implications for human rights,” including “on the right to life, the rights to health and medical care, the right to freedom from hunger, and the right to an adequate standard of living, food, education, work and housing.” UNHRC noted, in particular, its alarm at “the disproportionate and indiscriminate human costs of unilateral sanctions and their negative effects on the civilian population, in particular women and children.” Along with violating international law, economic sanctions do not even work for the purpose they are ostensibly imposed. Meanwhile, as The New York Times reports, “secondary sanctions on financial institutions and companies that do business with Iran have made it nearly impossible for Iran to buy items like ventilators to treat patients.” Human Rights Watch, dozens of US senators and congress members, and a group of influential former US and international officials have all urged the Trump administration to allow a humanitarian suspension of sanctions. “Regime change through economic measures likely to lead to the denial of basic human rights, and indeed possibly to starvation, has never been an accepted practice of international relations,” warned Idriss Jazairy, the UN special rapporteur responsible for economic sanctions. As The New York Times described it, Washington “is seizing on Venezuela’s economic pain and the coronavirus threat” – once again deploying pain as foreign policy amid a global pandemic.