Impact of Sanctions
Under Article 41 of the UN Charter, the Security Council may call upon Member States to apply measures not involving the use of armed forces in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. The number of sanctions regimes mandated by the United Nations Security Council is increasing. The Security Council has invoked Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter to impose sanctions in the following cases: Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Kosovo, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Sudan and former Yugoslavia.
As the Secretary-General stated in his first report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (S/1999/957) experience has shown that sanctions can have a highly negative impact on civilian populations, especially on vulnerable groups. Also regional sanctions and embargoes are of concern. Often they are hastily imposed by neighbouring countries and lack clear guidelines regarding the minimization of their humanitarian impact.
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, Liberia). 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 (Security Council resolution 1267/1999 and 1333/2000 on the Taliban and resolution 1343/2001 and 1478/2003 on Liberia).
Within the UN Secretariat, the Policy Branch of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was mandated to carry out these assessments of the humanitarian implications of sanctions, and to draft the relevant reports of the Secretary-General addressed to the Security Council.
To address the need for rigorous techniques to facilitate the collection and analysis of information related to humanitarian implications of sanctions, OCHA initiated a project in September 2002 to develop a standard methodology to assess the humanitarian implications of sanctions. The project that was funded by Switzerland and Canada resulted in the publication of two main documents: the 'Sanctions Assessment Handbook' and the companion set of concise 'Field Guidelines'. The assessment methodology presented in these two publications was developed by OCHA in conjunction with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee. It is serves as a standardized methodology to identify potential humanitarian implications of sanctions, with a view to making sanctions more effective.