Mr President,
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the members of this Council today on this important issue.
I respect very much the weighty responsibility that the Council holds under Chapter VII of the Charter. It is the Council’s vital prerogative to devise measures under article 41 in the pursuit of international peace and security, as we have heard so clearly just now from Rosemary [DiCarlo]. I thank the Council for its recent decision to confirm exemptions that have allowed humanitarian operations to continue in Afghanistan again, however, as we just heard, a resolution that passed only in December.
Sanctions are a fact of life in many humanitarian relief operations. They affect our operations directly and indirectly, and affect civilians, even when those impacts are unintended. However smart, however targeted they are, compliance with sanctions is a daily element in the work of humanitarian agencies. They can impact our logistics, our finances, our ability to deliver. They can have those impacts.
They can lead to humanitarian projects delaying or stalling. And some can threaten the wellbeing of the wider section of the population in civilian society.
So I welcome this opportunity, Mr President, to give a perspective on how sanctions can affect humanitarian needs and our response.
UN sanctions, and many of those enacted also by Member States, are not the blunt instruments of the past, as we have heard very clearly from Rosemary, and I stand with her on all her assertions.
The Security Council moved indeed, as we have heard, from broad economic and sectoral sanctions to more targeted sanctions in the 1990s.
We have seen cases where sanctions can positively impact compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law. As Rosemary mentioned, the threat of sanctions has pushed a number of non-State armed groups to release children from their ranks in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
UN sanctions are designed specifically also to limit unintended consequences, and I welcome this Council’s clear and consistent signals that they are not intended to have adverse humanitarian consequences.
I also welcome the Council regularly reaffirming that measures to implement sanctions need to comply with international humanitarian and human rights laws. This should translate into ensuring that sanctions do not indeed impede exclusively humanitarian activities, when conducted by impartial humanitarian actors.
In Somalia, and now, as mentioned, in Afghanistan, the UN sanctions regimes have shown themselves able to adapt and carve out space for humanitarian activities to continue. Two very welcome examples.
Despite attention to these risks, and frequent dialogue with the humanitarian community, UN sanctions can nevertheless have negative consequences on civilians and humanitarian operations. Sanctions applied by Member States carry similar risks and in fact often have a wider reach than sanctions imposed by the UN.
Allow me, Mr. President, to summarise some concerns over the use of sanctions in countries already affected by humanitarian crises, where civilians are already vulnerable and institutions already and frequently fragile:
Firstly, humanitarian access and principles can be put under pressure by the demands of sanctions. Sanctions can make it harder for humanitarian agencies to engage or transact with listed individuals or entities who hold significant control over the lives of entire populations. In addition, humanitarian independence, neutrality and ultimately impartiality can be undermined, for example, by demands to vet and potentially exclude individual recipients of humanitarian aid.
Secondly, banks and other commercial operators, aiming to avoid any risk of penalty or prosecution, can effectively deny services to humanitarian customers. They may sever commercial relationships or make routine transactions excessively slow and bureaucratic, even when they are well within permitted rules. Broad exemptions, for example those we now have on Afghanistan adopted by the Security Council and by some States have provided essential reassurances to humanitarian organizations. However, again we have heard from Rosemary the context of DPRK, service providers and financial flows can remain throttled due to overcompliance and de-risking.
Thirdly, commercial operators that trade food, fuel or other necessities can also decide to err on the side of caution; to over-comply. That can lead to shortages and to price rises. This is especially disastrous in fragile countries already heavily dependent on food imports and experiencing humanitarian crisis. Humanitarian carve-outs, as we now have on Afghanistan, can allow us to continue our programmes for those at greatest risk. But these, as we see and as we said so vividly in the Afghan case, cannot substitute for commercial imports and basic state services.
And finally, when ministries and departments are run by listed individuals, sanctions aimed at political movements and figures can limit the provision of social services and economic stability. In Afghanistan, neither the Central Bank nor any Government entity is sanctioned. Nevertheless, the risk that sanctioned actors might benefit from transactions led financial institutions in that case, to effectively blacklist the Afghan financial and commercial sector. The same chilling effect led many internationally funded projects to pause, withholding for example the payment of teachers or hospital workers via ministry accounts. There has been a great deal of work and attention to rectify exactly that situation and we are actually better off than we have been.
Mr President,
Mitigating the humanitarian impact of sanctions, therefore, requires us to continue to review both the way sanctions are designed and the way they are implemented and impact.
I would like to suggest some priorities:
I urge the Council and UN Member States to ensure that sanctions applicable in armed conflict do not impede the assistance and protection activities of impartial humanitarian organizations for persons who are not fighting, irrespective of their allegiance or designation. And in all contexts, they should ensure that sanctions do not restrict the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights including the right to food, water, shelter and health. Sanctions should not have cascading secondary implications that go beyond the focus of the action.
The Security Council and other jurisdictions implementing sanctions should build into the original legislations, comprehensive, humanitarian carve-outs from the outset, rather than caseby-case authorization procedures which can be cumbersome and inefficient.
Carve-outs should be smoothly translated into national legislation to lessen the concerns of humanitarian donors, NGOs and private companies. We have seen this recently with the United Kingdom’s swift domestication of the UN carve-out on Afghanistan, very welcome, which provides broad reassurances to UK NGOs and their partners.
Implementation, Mr. President, is sometimes, however, as important as design. It is this design that I now have been referring to.
I welcome proactive efforts to build confidence, for example the EU’s recent “letters of comfort” that provide reassurance to financial institutions, and we have seen that also recently from the US administration on Afghanistan. I also recall the US guidance that incidental payments and cases of aid diversion to Al-Shabaab in Somalia would not be a focus for sanctions enforcement, and that was most welcome.
For their own part, humanitarian agencies can also boost confidence by investing in risk management and due diligence. Operations in Syria’s northwest, so often discussed in this Chamber, are highly monitored, as this Council knows, and that gives confidence that humanitarian resources are used to provide assistance to those who need it and not for any other purpose; it is the essence of principled humanitarian action.
Mr President,
I have used the words can and may frequently in these remarks, and I emphasize the worries that we have often about the unintended consequences of the chilling effect of sanctions, where action is needed, and action, I think, is beginning to be taken more often. It is indeed our collective responsibility to ensure that sanctions can be used to improve compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law, and to ensure equally that they do not have those unintended consequences for civilians already caught up in crises.
I look forward, Mr. President, to continuing engagement with Member States, as we pursue efforts to that end.
Thank you very much.
Source: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs