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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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).
Redefining sanctions: less collateral damage? 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. 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. 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. However, despite this widely held negative view, sanctions are increasingly being used. 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. North Korea, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are just a few of the countries currently subjected to sanctions imposed by other countries or international bodies.
0 kommentar(er)
