BOOK PRESENTATION : Douhan Alena (dir.), Humanitarian Impact of Unilateral Sanctions and Over-Compliance. Theoretical challenges and practical implications, Paris, Académie de Géopolitique de Paris, 2025.
Professor Alena DOUHAN is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights.
Unilateral sanctions are currently frequently used by some states as a means of foreign policy. State also use the rhetoric of sanctions, with the main emphasis on the pursuit of “common goals”, without assessing, whether contemporary international law based on the Charter of the United Nations, its fundamental purposes and principles provides for any possibility to use such unilateral measures.
As a result despite the fact that principles of international law, including the principle of sovereign equality of states, principle of non-intervention into domestic affairs of states, principle of peaceful settlement of international disputes, obligation to respect its international obligations qualify as peremptory norms of international law, and contrary article 27 of the Vienna convention of the Law of international treaties, prohibiting states “to invoke the provisions of their internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty”, sanctioning states actively use unilateral sanctions and enforce their implementation without any assessment of their legality from the perspective of international law.
Unilateral sanctions despite their announced targeted character are traditionally interpreted broadly affecting not only designated individuals or companies, but also sectors of economy and states. As a result, the whole population of the country under sanctions becomes affected by the complexity of unilateral sanctions. Humanitarian assistance are often not available or just partially available despite the de jure announced humanitarian exemptions in sanctions’ regulations.
Multiplicity of sanctions regimes and their uncertainty, extremely broad interpretation of sanctions regulations by organs of sanctioning states, severe penalties for circumvention/ alleged circumvention of sanctions’ regimes, challenges to get access to justice to appeal listing or any type of penalties results in growing de-risking policies. Consequent over-compliance exacerbates humanitarian consequences of unilateral sanctions, with the most severe effect over the most vulnerable groups: women, children, people with disabilities, people suffering from the rare or severe deceases, minorities, marginalized groups.
This book includes chapters submitted by scholars from different parts of the world, including sanctioning countries, countries under sanctions and third states, that provided the possibility for the comprehensive and impartial assessment.
The book provides an overview of some theoretical and practical issues of the very notion of and challenges caused by unilateral sanctions from the perspective of international law.
Its main focus however, is to demonstrate and assess humanitarian impact of unilateral sanctions, means of their enforcement and over-compliance on human rights of specific individuals and population of affected countries in general, groups of human rights, specific human rights (primarily those, which are affected the most), as well as impact on human rights in affected countries or the approach of such countries to the sanctions imposed.
