This article is reproduced from CommonDreams, with thanks.
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As human rights defenders marked the 75th anniversary of the Fourth Geneva Convention and its prohibition on collective punishment, hundreds of legal experts and groups have urged the global community – and the United States government in particular – “to comply with international law by ending the use of broad, unilateral coercive measures that extensively harm civilian populations”.
In a letter to US president Joe Biden, the jurists and legal groups wrote: “Seventy-five years ago, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, nations of the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland, to establish clear legal limits on the treatment of non-combatants in times of war.
“The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare.
“One key provision … is the prohibition of collective punishment, which is considered a war crime,” the letter continues. “We consider the unilateral application of certain economic sanctions to constitute collective punishment.”
Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild – one of the letter’s signatories – said in a statement that “economic sanctions cause direct material harm not only to the people living on the receiving end of these policies, but also to those who rely on trade and economic relations with sanctioned countries.
“The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare and hold the US government accountable for violating international law every time it wields these coercive measures,” she added.
The new letter states:
“Collective punishment is a standard practice of US foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions. While other countries apply sanctions in some form, the United States imposes more unilateral economic sanctions than any other country in the world by far.
“Though this method of collective punishment may differ from that of conventional warfare, and is often applied outside of declared military conflict, its collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive and deadly.
“Hundreds of millions of people currently live under such broad US economic sanctions in some form, including in notable cases such as Cuba, Iran, north Korea, Syria and Venezuela,” the letter notes.
“The evidence that these measures can cause severe, widespread civilian harm, including death, is overwhelming. Broad economic sanctions can spark and prolong economic crises, hinder access to essential goods like food, fuel and medicine, and increase poverty, hunger, disease and even death rates, especially among children. Such conditions, in turn, often drive mass migration, as in the recent cases of Cuba and Venezuela.”
For more than 64 years, the USA has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that has adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island’s economy and severely limited Cubans’ access to basic necessities, including food, fuel and medicine.
The Cuban government claims that the blockade cost the country’s economy nearly $5bn in just one 11-month period in 2022–23 alone. For the past 32 years, United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly against the US embargo on Cuba. Last year’s vote was 187–2, with the USA and Israel as the only dissenters.
According to a 2019 report from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, DC, as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017–18 owing to US sanctions, which have made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine and other necessities.
“Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent,” the new letter asserts. “A 1960 State Department memo on the embargo of Cuba suggested ‘denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government’.
“Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent.
“Asked whether the Trump administration’s sanctions on Iran were working as intended, then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo responded that ‘things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we’re convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behaviour of the regime’,” the signatories added.
… Sanctions also fail to work as intended to topple targeted regimes. Cuba’s revolutionary government has outlasted a dozen US presidents. Iran has been under US sanctions since the late 1970s, yet its islamic regime remains entrenched and has forged closer relations with Russia and China. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is still in power despite two decades of US sanctions. North Korea’s government shows no signs of cracking after seven decades of sanctions.
Others have highlighted the hypocrisy of the United States sanctioning nations over ideological differences while supporting brutal dictatorships including Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan and Equatorial Guinea, and other gross human rights violators like apartheid Israel, which is on trial for genocide at the world court.
Instead of punishing Israel, the US House of Representatives – with the assent of dozens of Democratic lawmakers – passed legislation to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor is seeking to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders.
“The Geneva conventions, for all of their limitations and subsequent violations, were a triumph of international law in the protection of civilians during times of war,” the new letter asserts. “Yet today, hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer – and hundreds of thousands have died – even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States.
“As members of the legal community, we call on the United States to comply with existing international law by ending the use of broad unilateral coercive measures,” the signatories added. “Seventy-five years after the Geneva conventions, collective punishment must end.”
