(Bloomberg) -- Hundreds of lawyers from around the world called on the US to end the use of unilateral economic sanctions, saying the tool amounts to collective punishment of civilians and is illegal under international law.
In a letter to President Joe Biden, the lawyers, legal organizations and scholars decried the US’s increased reliance on sanctions to punish and coerce its adversaries and said the measures can lead to economic instability, hunger and reduced access to medicine and essential goods.
“Collective punishment is a standard practice of US foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions,” the signatories said. While the use of sanctions is different from conventional warfare, “its collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive, and deadly,” they said.
The letter amounts to an attempt to push back against successive administrations’ increased reliance on financial sanctions instead of military force to punish countries such as Russia and Iran. Waves of sanctions have now choked off Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and many other countries from the global economy, though many regimes have found workarounds to stay afloat.
US officials generally cite humanitarian exemptions to broad economic sanctions, saying government actions are carefully calibrated to avoid harming civilians. Sanctions against Iran, for instance, have humanitarian “carve-outs” to ensure civilians retain access to food, medicine and other essential goods.
Still, humanitarian organizations complain that the sanctions make it more difficult to aid civilians, and blame sanctions for instability and poverty in Venezuela, Cuba and other nations that have led to increased migrant flows to the US.
Signers include human-rights lawyers, self-described progressive groups such as the National Lawyers Guild, the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights, and law professors.
“The United States does not consider itself to be at war with these states that it’s imposing sanctions on, and nevertheless is doing things that have effects that states have outlawed even in the context of war,” said Ntina Tzouvala, associate professor at the Australian National University College of Law.
She said the US government’s increased targeting of financial transactions and aggressive prosecutions by the Justice Department “creates a culture of over-compliance from private actors.”
The letter-writers said sanctions are often meant to punish innocent people. They point to a 1960 State Department memo suggesting that economic desperation and hunger could spur regime change in Cuba.
More recently, the authors quote then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as saying poor living conditions in Iran could spur popular revolt against the regime.
“Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent,” the writers said.
While the letter may not yield a policy shift from the outgoing Biden administration, its signers hope to raise awareness not only among policymakers but within the general public.
“I just don’t think that people really understand the horror that sanctions wreak on the people” rather than the government of a targeted country, said Marjorie Cohn, a past president of the National Lawyers Guild who signed the letter to Biden.
The authors point to resolutions from the United Nations General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council that challenge unilateral sanctions as violations of the UN Charter. They also cite the fourth Geneva Convention, which calls collective punishment a war crime.
The letter is timed to the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, which prescribe rules for the treatment of noncombatants in wartime.
“The bigger consideration, of course, is both the factual proliferation of sanctions and their effects on ordinary citizens,” Tzouvala said.
(Updates with analyst comment in 13th paragraph.)
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