Afghanistan (IRIN)

As the Secretary-General stated in his first report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, experience has shown that sanctions can have a highly negative impact on civilian populations, especially children and women. Regional sanctions and embargoes are of special concern. Often hastily imposed by neighboring countries without clear guidelines regarding the minimization of their humanitarian impact, regional sanctions have hampered the provision of emergency humanitarian assistance in recent years.

It therefore follows that sanctions regimes continue to be an increasingly difficult dilemma for the United Nations’ dual mandate of preserving peace and protecting human needs. As the Secretary-General noted: “Humanitarian and human rights policy goals cannot easily be reconciled with those of sanctions regimes”. 

Aware of this quandary a general consciousness evolved also within the UN Security Council that “further collective actions in the SC within the context of any further sanctions regime should be directed to minimize unintended adverse side effects of sanctions on the most vulnerable segments of targeted countries.”  

This led to the realization that comprehensive economic sanctions or broad trade embargoes are coercive measures of the past and that in today’s sanctions policies, strategies for mitigating adverse humanitarian impacts on vulnerable populations have imperatively to be incorporated from the very beginning.  

Security Council and UN Secretariat have responded positively to this challenge for more humane sanctions regimes and have increasingly used more targeted sanctions (e.g. Sierra Leone, Afghanistan). Also the request of the Council for monitoring and reporting mechanisms to assess the humanitarian implications of the sanctions regimes imposed on Afghanistan and Liberia is a an indication of the Security Council’s increased awareness of the potential harm sanctions can inflict on the humanitarian situation of the targeted country. This development has helped to address some of the concerns about UN culpability for sanctions-related suffering.

Today it is an accepted standard that sanctions authorities bear the fundamental responsibility for mitigating the unintended consequences and for ensuring that the coercive measures enacted to uphold international norms do not cause suffering disproportionate to the ends served.

Political gain and civilian pain of sanctions regimes cannot be separated anymore from one another or analysed in isolation. The art of sanctions statecraft lies in applying sanctions that are sufficiently forceful to persuade targeted leaders to move toward political compliance while avoiding severe humanitarian impacts that undermine the viability of the policy and of the instruments itself.