Background

The use of sanctions as a unilateral coercive measure has accelerated enormously in recent years, expanding the harm they unintentionally cause to the human rights of individuals, groups and sometimes entire populations. Exemptions for humanitarian goods and services have been largely ineffective in mitigating the harm, while it has been magnified by widespread over-compliance with unilateral sanctions due to their complexity and lack of clarity, harsh enforcement and fears of penalties for inadvertent violations.¹ Measuring the impact of unilateral sanctions on human rights is essential to alleviating this situation for all affected individuals, but as sanctions often coexist with other causes of human rights problems, such as endemic poverty or a military conflict, it is challenging to isolate them as a factor. The ability to demonstrate how sanctions affect human rights is also critical for monitoring this impact.

To address this need, the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights seeks to develop a universal and uniform system of indicators for identifying and assessing the specific impact of unilateral sanctions – those imposed by states or groups of states outside the context of international sanctions authorized by the UN Security Council.

For the purpose of consistency and transparency the Special Rapporteur seeks to build up the methodology of assessment on the work of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which produced a handbook in 2004 for assessing the humanitarian impact of international and unilateral sanctions.² Since then, the situation with regard to unilateral sanctions has changed profoundly. Today they are a standard tool of many countries’ foreign policies, while the types of sanctions imposed, the types of targets designated and the methods of enforcement have all evolved considerably, giving rise to new phenomena such as secondary sanctions against presumed violators as well as the rapid spread of over-compliance. Meanwhile, unilateral sanctions are frequently implicated in harming the rights of indirect and unintended targets,³ and it is increasingly clear that efforts to limit the humanitarian impact of unilateral sanctions are largely unsuccessful.

Developing a system of indicators to measure the impact of unilateral sanctions on human rights is important for several reasons:

First, effectively countering the harm caused by unilateral sanctions, whether proactively or remedially, requires knowing the breadth and magnitude of this harm as accurately as possible, to guarantee its impartiality, comprehensiveness and verification.

Second, having data on the human rights impact of unilateral sanctions allows the impact to be monitored on an ongoing basis for any changes that may occur, including changes that show the effectiveness of actions to mitigate the harm.

Third, the availability of data makes it possible for researchers, legislators, regulators and others to more readily discern trends and to address the human rights impact of unilateral sanctions, to improve the situations of populations and their right to development.

Finally, one of the reasons for asserting that most unilateral sanctions violate international law is that they breach the obligation of states to protect and respect human rights;⁴ while such harm is obvious through observation, measuring and assessing it through indicators can yield concrete data to reinforce this argument.

Objective and outcome

There is a shared belief among experts and practitioners that since the first attempts of the late 1990s and early 2000s, there has been no systematic work towards the development of monitoring and impact assessment models, despite the proliferation of unilateral sanctions and the growing data around key humanitarian impact clusters, including health, food and nutrition, water and sanitation, as well as education.

As a starting point, there is a need for a clear understanding of the current state of affairs regarding UCM impact assessment: the models, the approaches, the reasons for selecting certain monitoring principles and indicators, and the evolution of the overall thinking and analytical work in this particular area.

To develop a system of indicators to measure the impact of unilateral sanctions on human rights, the Special Rapporteur invites contributions from governments, regional and international organizations, human rights institutions, research institutions, civil society, businesses, scholars and others, including victims, who may wish to submit input about:

(1) methodology, how to isolate the specific impact of unilateral sanctions on the enjoyment of human rights from other factors that may be affecting human rights,

(2) a system of effective and credible indicators to measure the breadth and magnitude of the sanctions-related impact.

The objective is to draft a preliminary document that presents the indicators with a methodology that is readily understandable across a broad range of actors, and that is usable in a broad range of national situations involving sanctioned countries or countries in which key economic sectors, entities or individuals are sanctioned.

The system of indicators is intended to complement and update the OCHA methodology and similar past efforts, taking into account today’s situation regarding unilateral sanctions and their enforcement, with a focus on identifying the specific human rights affected; ascertaining the targets, including intended, unintended, direct and indirect targets; and determining how extensive the impact is.

Questions to be considered

Contributors are invited to consider the following questions, as well as other questions they perceive as relevant to the development of an effective system of indicators.

1. What is the current state of affairs regarding the assessment of the human rights impact of sanctions – the models, the approaches, the reasons for selecting certain monitoring principles and indicators, and the evolution of overall thinking and analytical work in this area?

2. What forms should an assessment take, to establish a “best practice” standard?

• Should it be inherently “comprehensive”?
• Should it be judged by the nature or quantity of available data?
• Should it be based only on quantitative data?
• Should it be based on a comparative analysis (before and after the imposition of sanctions; between various points while sanctions are in effect)?
• What should be the baseline conditions for the impact assessment? And how could these baseline conditions be identified for countries with long-standing sanctions?
• What is the most desirable timing for indicators and assessments? (How frequently or regularly should they be produced? Should the timing be associated with events, such as a change in a sanctions regime?)

3. Of the different types of indicators referred to in existing research, what type(s) should be used?

• Structural indicators, reflecting the institutional, economic and other situations in the country in a given time
• Process indicators, measuring the performance of certain processes
• Outcome indicators, measuring the results of certain processes and ultimately the impact on selected areas

In order to identify and select specific indicators belonging to above-mentioned general categories, it is desirable to establish the chain of causation between the observed phenomena. In addition, the impact may not always be identified through outcome indicators and their quantitative values, but instead through observed changes in policies as a result of the imposition of unilateral sanctions and in an effort to anticipate the possible adverse effects.

4. What, specifically, should be measured?

• Should indicators cover all human rights collectively or certain rights individually, and should different rights be weighted differently?
• Should indicators distinguish between the immediate human rights impact of unilateral sanctions and any longer-term forms of impact?
• Should there be indicators of the effectiveness of humanitarian exemptions to sanctions?
• Should indicators cover the human rights impact of unilateral sanctions plus over-compliance together, or should over-compliance be measured separately? (If separately, how can the impact of over-compliance be distinguished?)
• Should indicators come from a variety of disciplines, given the different types of unilateral sanctions and their multifaceted impact?
• Should the human rights impact of unilateral sanctions be measured in relative terms against other factors that may be simultaneously affecting human rights?

5. How should measurements be done?

• What types of sources should be relied upon (statistical data, field observations, etc.)?
• How should the integrity of the information from sources be determined?
• Should different types of unilateral sanctions be measured differently? (Different types of sanctions may affect socio-economic realities differently, while the imposition of more than one type of unilateral sanctions may lead to an aggregate effect on a specific area and on a specific segment of society.)
• How can the impact of unilateral sanctions on a country’s development be assessed?
• Can everything that is desirable to measure actually be measured? What obstacles can be identified?

Often, the choice of indicators is based on the availability of relevant data, and feasibility/capacity to produce such data. It is important to discuss about existing data sources, their frequency/periodicity, as well as the key actors producing such data.

6. Who should perform the measurements?

• Should particular entities be implicated in issuing the indicators or producing analyses from them? If so, what types of entities should be involved (UN agency, NGO, university, government, etc.), and how should they be determined (integrity, credibility, reputation, objectivity, neutrality, etc.)?

7. What blocks shall be included in the methodology?

• Health
• Food security
• Labour and economic rights
• Social Guarantees
• Education
• Functioning of humanitarian actors /delivery of humanitarian aid
• Development /developmental projects
• Protection of vulnerable groups
• Cultural Rights
• Other blocks

8. What shall be the content of / main indicators in each of these blocks?

1. Alena Douhan, Report of the Special Rapporteur, “Secondary sanctions, civil and criminal penalties for circumvention of sanctions regimes, and over-compliance with sanctions,” 2022.

2. Manuel Bessler, Richard Garfield and Gerard McHugh, Sanctions Assessment Handbook: Assessing the Humanitarian Impact of Sanctions (New York: United Nations, 2004).

3. Alena Douhan, Report of the Special Rapporteur, “Targets of unilateral coercive measures: notion, categories and vulnerable groups,” A/76/174/Rev.1, 13 September 2021.

4. Michael J. Strauss, “The (il)legality of unilateral sanctions in light of the inadequacy of humanitarian exemptions,” Journal of the Belarusian State University – International Relations, 2021-1, pp. 86-97.