A/HRC/39/54 painful if the regime does not change its course from the unacceptable and unproductive path it has chosen to one that rejoins the league of nations. These will indeed end up being the strongest sanctions in history when we are complete. … After our sanctions come in force, it will be battling to keep its economy alive”.29 The underlying reasoning, considered as a justification of that approach, has been clarified by United States officials as follows: “We do think that, given the IRGC’s penetration of the Iranian economy and Iran’s behaviour in the region, as well as its other nefarious activities, that companies should not do business in Iran. That is an intended consequence”.30 The stated intention of the United States is to build the economic isolation of Iran through wide use of secondary sanctions. 31 Thus, the (alleged) malign behaviour of the Iranian political leadership, as unilaterally ascertained by the leadership of one single State, serves as a justification for the imposition of what is intended to be in practice the strongest sanctions regime in history. No doubt the impact of the sanctions will harm ordinary people in the Islamic Republic of Iran and affect their enjoyment of a range of human rights. Not only is such an adverse effect not denied, but this is even an intended, assumed and claimed consequence of the sanctions to come. 34. The reimposition of a comprehensive trade embargo on the Islamic Republic of Iran, purporting to apply to third parties worldwide under the threat of adverse consequences for corporations also doing business in the United States is a significant step backwards. 32 It exemplifies the rise of sanctions regimes whose effects correspond in some way to a peacetime blockade, the difference from a wartime blockade being, as noted previously, that the corresponding international protection provided by international humanitarian law in wartime does not appear to be readily available. An evaluation of the consequences of this sanctions regime calls for an evaluation of those measures against the criteria set in international humanitarian law and for the immediate cessation of those measures found to disregard the imperatives of necessity, proportionality and discrimination. As is well known, the catastrophic consequences for human rights of broad trade embargoes imposed under the authority of the United Nations in the 1990s, especially with respect to Iraq, 33 prompted a shift away from comprehensive sanctions to so-called smart sanctions. As was noted by some scholars in 2003, a “new norm against comprehensive sanctions has become part of the shared understanding among states”.34 It could be hoped that this move would be irreversible; but this has proven not to be the case. While the Special Rapporteur has in a previous report questioned the “smartness” of smart sanctions, he acknowledges that comprehensive sanctions have the potential to hurt civilian populations in a much more severe manner. The position expressed in 2008 by the European Parliament that it opposed “the application, in all circumstances, of generalised, indiscriminate sanctions to any country, since this approach leads de facto to the total isolation of the population”35 is of continued relevance and should be reaffirmed. It is to be emphasized that the combination of comprehensive unilateral coercive measures and of the imposition of secondary sanctions on third parties unrelated to the dispute are tantamount to a peacetime blockade. 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 See www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2018/05/282301.htm. See www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/05/281959.htm. Ibid. See, for example, www.ft.com/content/cfe5b294-7e0e-11e8-bc55-50daf11b720d. Iraqi gross domestic product was cut roughly in half by the sanctions. It has been estimated that the country lost between $175 billion and $250 billion in possible oil revenues from the sanctions. The price of a family’s food supply for a month increased 250 times over the first five years of the sanctions regime. According to estimates, the sanctions caused a minimum of 100,000 and up to 227,000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 to March 1998. See Daniel. W. Drezner “Economic sanctions in theory and practice: how smart are they?” in Coercion. The Power to Hurt in International Politics, Kelly M. Greenhill and Peter Krause, eds. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 259. Also, it has been noted that economic sanctions may well have been the cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history: see John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of mass destruction”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 78, No. 3 (May–June 1999). See Darren Hawkins and Joshua Lloyd, “Questioning comprehensive sanctions: the birth of a norm”, Journal of Human Rights vol. 2, No. 3 (2003). European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Report on the evaluation of EU sanctions as part of the EU’s actions and policies in the area of human rights” (15 July 2008), para. 14. 11