Sanctions against Iran and the Law of the Sea

Abstract

Since 2006, Iran has been subject to a range of international sanctions, both collectively through the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), and individually by States such as the United States. These sanctions, of an increasingly stringent nature, seek to ensure the peaceful development of Iran's nuclear energy program. To this end, the sanctions now cover a wide range of activities, including the export to Iran of materials and technologies that could advance Iran‟s nuclear weapons program, restrictions on arms trading, limits on foreign trade with certain named persons, restrictions on the provision of financial services, asset-freezing measures, controls on shipping and air transport, and, most recently, controls on certain dealings with Iran‟s oil and gas sectors. This short note reviews the key provisions of the sanctions as adopted at the UN and EU levels. It focuses on the specific measures taken as they relate to maritime matters. Two issues are especially important in this respect. First, since the international sanctions require States to control a range of private transactions, such as shipping services, the effective operation of UN sanctions depends upon States being able to transpose general sanctions into measures which can create sufficiently certain levels of legal conduct for individuals. It is not clear that this is easily done in practice. Second, it is clear that successful sanctions require considerable constraints on international shipping, because this is the principal means by which goods enter and leave Iran. This raises questions about the extent to which aspects of the sanctions can be reconciled with the law of the sea, particularly as regards inspections and limits on shipping transactions.