A/HRC/30/45 14. The Special Rapporteur will consider as unilateral coercive measures, measures other than those taken by the Security Council under article 41 of the Charter of the United Nations. Only the latter are truly multilateral from the point of view of the United Nations, under whose aegis the present report is being elaborated. There is a presumption that, once the Security Council has decided on sanctions, and without prejudice to the exercise of the right to self-defence referred to in article 51 of the Charter, Member States have to comply with its decisions without adding to or retrenching from their content, pursuant to articles 25, 48(2) and 103 of the Charter. However, this is not always the case. 15. Coercive measures imposed by international financial institutions and regional bodies on their own members or on candidates to membership are not usually considered as “unilateral” as they are part of a package of rights and obligations whose prior acceptance by target countries are conditions for membership. Take, for instance, a duty-free zone established between an economic grouping and a partner State. The decision by the former to withhold free-entry status to products originating in land not part of the territory of the partner State according to international law is not a unilateral coercive measure because it is part of an international agreement that carries with it a territorial definition known to cosignatories.3 However, the use of international financial institutions by one or several member States through their weighted voting rights as a conduit for their national policies on unilateral coercive measures should be part of the remit of the present mandate.4 Finally, coercive measures from regional groupings of countries or from one of their Member States targeting third countries are considered as unilateral in the sense that they are imposed pursuant to rules at no time endorsed by the targeted country. 16. Unilateral coercive measures can be comprehensive or targeted. The latter are also referred to as “smart” measures.5 They owe this epithet to the claim that they minimize collateral damage in terms in particular of avoiding to jeopardize the enjoyment of human rights by the poorest and most vulnerable groups in the society of the targeted country. The former are measures aimed at the whole economy or financial system of a country. They tend to be indiscriminate and therefore to have adverse human rights impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the society of the targeted country. Their effectiveness is gauged in the light of their capacity to impose broad-based policy changes or to create sufficient economic distress in the targeted country to incite the people to rise against their political leadership. “Smart” coercive measures, for their part, may be aimed at certain sectors of the economic activity of a country or be broader but specific to a circumscribed expanse of territory. Their impact may be to destabilize a particular branch of production or a particular geographic area. The right to work and to a decent standard of living of people deriving their income from the sector or the region may be compromised. However, the adverse impact on human rights in both cases is likely, in theory, to be more limited than in the case of comprehensive coercive measures targeting a whole country. 6 In practice, it may 3 4 5 6 Alex Barker and John Reed “European Union close to labelling Palestinian products”, Financial Times, 20 July 2015. See, for instance, the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (Public Law 107-99Dec.21, 2001) of the United States of America, which provides that the Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States Executive Director to each international financial institution to oppose and vote against: (a) any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or (b) any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution. Thomas J. Biersteker, “Scholarly Participation in Transnational Policy Networks: The Case of Targeted Sanctions” in Mariano E. Bertucci and Abraham F. Lowenthal (eds.) Narrowing the Gap: Scholars, Policy-Makers and International Affairs (Balitmore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). See General Assembly resolution 41/128. 5