Targeted Sanctions and Individual Human Rights

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the UN security council has experimented with, developed, and refined the instrument of targeted sanctions. Targeted sanctions were first introduced in 1992 to isolate and pressure the political leadership of Libya to turn over individuals suspected of involvement in the attacks on Pan Am and UTA. They were developed and refined with the financial targeting of the military leadership of the Raoul Cedras regime in 1994, following its overthrow of the democratically elected government in Haiti. The UN's move to targeted sanctions was complete following the full realization of the humanitarian crisis caused by the imposition of comprehensive sanctions against Iraq in the mid- to late 1990s (and the inability of the oil-for-food program to relieve adequately the human suffering involved). As a result of the debacle caused by the imposition of comprehensive sanctions against Iraq, UN sanctions today are targeted sanctions.Sanctions can be targeted in a number of different ways - against an individual, against a corporate entity (such as a firm or political party), against a sector of an economy (an arms embargo, aviation ban, or a ban on the trade in high-value commodities like diamonds, oil, or timber), or against a single region of a country (as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). They can be used for a variety of different purposes, from the pursuit of individuals for legal prosecution to efforts to halt massive human rights violations, to enforce the terms of peace agreements, to counter the financing of terrorism, orto prevent or delay the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.There are both theoretical and practical advantages to the use of targeted sanctions, particularly when they are compared with the bluntness and relatively indiscriminate nature of comprehensive sanctions. In contrast to comprehensive sanctions, targeted sanctions can be applied gradually, combined with positive incentives, and relaxed more readily in the case of partial compliance by the targets of sanctions. There is an all or nothing character to comprehensive sanctions, and any relaxation or adaptation is often interpreted as a weakening of political resolve among the sanctioning parties. If properly targeted and implemented, targeted sanctions do not penalize an entire population for actions taken by an unrepresentative (and often unelected) elite. They can relieve the sanctions instrument of some, but not necessarily all, of its negative humanitarian costs.With the unusually rapid development of the regime to counter the financing of terrorism after 2001, with its national legal harmonization, parallel reporting requirements, and institutionalization within financial institutions, the potential effectiveness of multilateral targeted sanctions measures has been significantly enhanced.1 As a result, assuming a consensus can be maintained among the permanent five members of the UN security council, the application of targeted financial sanctions is likely to be more common, and possibly more effective, in the future.Despite these and other advantages associated with targeted sanctions, there is one issue that has undermined the instrument - the way in which targeted sanctions can violate individual human rights. The UN is a profoundly state-centric institution, and the UN security council was accustomed to the idea of member states acting collectively to impose a sanction on another member state. With the move to targeted sanctions, however, the security council moved from imposing sanctions against states to imposing sanctions against individuals, groups, and corporate entities. Ironically, this move was undertaken in the name of protecting the human rights of a larger population.When targeted sanctions were first introduced in the early 1990s, the rights of those individuals targeted, typically sovereign heads of state and/ or their key political supporters, were not of primary concern. …