An International Convention Can Make Sanctions More Humane
Sanctions have affects akin to war, but are deployed with far less scrutiny or oversight than military operations.
By Alistair Millar
Economic sanctions have long been justified and defended as the humane alternative to military force, and thus offered as an instrument of statecraft that avoids the direct violence of armed conflict. This claim is no longer plausible. With their increased use sanctions have devolved into something far more consequential and oppressive than a “peaceful use of diplomacy.” In most cases, rather than resolving conflicts, sanctions now constitute a form of economic warfare capable of inflicting widespread harm on civilian populations, destabilizing essential infrastructure, and prolonging geopolitical conflicts.
Major sanctions regimes frequently operate with the same structural logic as siege warfare by denying a population access to essential goods, including basic food and essential medical supplies. The use of financial sanctions — especially restrictions on access to banking networks, payment systems for business and remittances, and foreign exchange — can induce long-lasting national economic crises. When applied indiscriminately, sanctions’ consequences inflict a human toll as high as some instances of wartime devastation. Their effects are rarely limited to political elites who often have the means to subvert or avoid significant consequences; rather, they disproportionately harm vulnerable people.
In the absence of a formal treaty that codifies prohibitions on specific sanctions and their means of implementation and enforcement, dysfunctional and inhumane sanctions regimes will continue.
Yet sanctions are deployed with far less scrutiny or oversight than military operations. Following the humanitarian catastrophe of the comprehensive embargo on Iraq, the Interlaken Process (1998) and the Bonn-Berlin Process (2001) were launched to refine sanctions into “targeted” or “smart” tools of economic statecraft. More recently the notion of voluntary “codes of conduct” and technical guidelines in the form of a checklist for relevant staff tasked with imposing sanctions have also been considered. Yet, for the past decade, sanctions have required no multilateral (and in the U.S., scant Congressional) approval and rarely undergo an independent assessment of civilian impact.
Despite these important efforts, these reformulations are often ignored in practice. In the absence of a formal treaty that codifies prohibitions on specific sanctions and their means of implementation and enforcement, dysfunctional and inhumane sanctions regimes will continue.
A “Convention on the Regulation and Prohibition of Coercive Economic Measures” would establish universally recognized norms. Such a convention should not eliminate sanctions entirely. Targeted measures against individuals engaged in terrorism or genocide remain indispensable. Instead, this convention would restrict the collective punishment and broad-based embargoes that disproportionately and indiscriminately harm vulnerable populations. Five key elements should be included in this convention.
First, the convention should mandate humanitarian carve-outs. Protecting basic human needs through mandatory humanitarian carve-outs must be at the core of this new normative framework for economic coercion. The convention should include a ban on sanctions that restrict food, medicine, and water technology, moving these from discretionary exemptions to absolute rights. Importantly, this must be complemented by a ban on sanctions that restrict the critical infrastructure facilitating access to water, access to food, and access to healthcare. But it should also include infrastructure that is not commonly considered humanitarian in nature, such as roads, bridges, ports, railways, airports, power plants, grid connections, and fuel depots. A precedent for this broad understanding of critical infrastructure has been set in Security Council Resolution 2664 (2022), adopting a humanitarian carveout for most UN asset freeze regimes, and S/RES/2761 (2024) which exempts humanitarian aid providers from asset freeze measures imposed on Al-Qaida, Taliban and ISIL (Resolutions 1267/1989/2253).
Second, the convention should establish the principle of distinction in the design and implementation of sanctions. International humanitarian law contains clear principles: distinction, proportionality, and necessity. These prohibit the deliberate targeting of civilians or civilian infrastructure in wartime. But international humanitarian law applies only to armed conflict. An obligation to tailor sanctions as narrowly as possible to avoid civilian harm — applying the Geneva Conventions’ logic to the financial sphere — should therefore be included in the Convention.
Third, the convention should require that countries imposing sanctions avoid undermining economic integrity. Current (and past) sanctions imposed by a state or bloc — no matter how destructive its socioeconomic effects — do not trigger these protections. It is therefore critical that the proposed convention must prohibit measures intended to collapse a nation’s entire currency or public utilities.
Fourth, the convention should mandate that all proposed sanctions undergo rigorous, independent humanitarian impact assessments prior to implementation, as strongly advocated by recent UN Special Rapporteur reports.
Finally, the convention should establish a multilateral oversight body that will enforce its principles and provisions. This organization could be analogous to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, empowered to monitor compliance and investigate abuses of economic power. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the global, intergovernmental, standard-setting body for combating money laundering and terrorist financing (CFT) and could also be adapted to inform the substance of compliance measures for a proposed convention on sanctions.
The prospect of a new international legal regime taking root, especially amidst the increasing strain on the United Nations and other fora designed to uphold international norms and laws, may be highly unlikely in the near-term. It will take time to rebuild trust and forge any consensus, as was the case in some of the isolated, but real successes noted above. The urgency of at least taking the first step toward limiting the humanitarian impact of sanctions now is also clear.
It is important to note that even though critics will point to the fact that there are violations of international humanitarian law, these norms are not insignificant. For example, the provision of medical care in war zones, the establishment of civilian evacuation corridors, and the protection of aid delivery simply would not happen without the existence of international humanitarian law.
Allowing sanctions to become akin to all out warfare rather than an extension of diplomacy is already unacceptable. Just as the global community recognized that certain acts of war are too destructive to be tolerated, it must now acknowledge that certain forms of economic coercion are incompatible with the principles of human dignity.
Now is the time to take that first vital step and then push for a legal regime to make all elements of the proposed convention on sanctions enumerated above — including food, medicine, water, and the infrastructure of delivering those goods — permanently exempt from sanctions in any form. Only bold action of this sort will return sanctions to being a legitimate tool of statecraft and diplomacy, rather than a blunt, illegitimate economic weapon.
Alistair Millar is the president of Fourth Freedom Forum and an adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He is a member of the Bologna Initiative for Sanctions Relief.
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