US sanctions on Iran killing innocent people

In late October, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a short report with a sharp title: "Maximum Pressure: US Economic Sanctions Harm Iranians' Right to Health." In November 2018, the US renewed its unilateral sanctions against Iran, and included "secondary sanctions" on non-US entities. These secondary sanctions choked off Iran's ability to buy commercially many products, including crucial medical supplies.

"The consequences of redoubled US sanctions," writes HRW, "pose a serious threat to Iranians' right to health and access to essential medicines - and has almost certainly contributed to documented shortages - ranging from a lack of critical drugs for epilepsy patients to limited chemotherapy medications for Iranians with cancer." Human Rights Watch is not the first to document this serious situation. Unilateral US sanctions under then-president Barack Obama had already badly damaged the health of Iranians. In 2013, Siamak Namazi wrote a first-rate report for the Wilson Center, in which he noted, "Sanctions are indeed causing disruptions in the supply of medicine and medical equipment in Iran. Procurement of the most advanced life-saving medicines and their chemical raw materials from the United States and Europe has been particularly challenging."

Over the course of the past several years, the medical journal The Lancet has run a series of important studies of the deteriorating health conditions in Iran as a result of the unilateral US sanctions. This August, five doctors based in the United States and Iran wrote a powerful editorial in The Lancet, which pointed out that Iran's system of universal health coverage has been deeply damaged by the sanctions, and that Iran is at "a high risk of moving towards a severe situation for the provision of health services with a potentially substantive impact on mortality and morbidity."

A year ago, Dr Seyed Alireza Marandi, the president of Iran's Academy of Medical Sciences, wrote one of many letters to the UN secretary general. He pointed out that patients who require organ transplants and who have cancer are being "deliberately denied medicine and medical equipment." There has been no public answer to these letters. The evidence is undeniable. The US sanctions are seriously damaging Iran's health infrastructure and are leading to immediate deaths and suffering of the Iranian population. Last year, the United Nations' special rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures, Idriss Jazairy, concluded from a look at the sanctions regime, "The current system creates doubt and ambiguity which makes it all but impossible for Iran to import these urgently needed humanitarian goods. This ambiguity causes a 'chilling effect' which is likely to lead to silent deaths in hospitals as medicines run out, while the international media fail to notice."

The US government has used every mechanism possible to suffocate Iran. It has used its Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) facility, its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list, and its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to tighten its grip on the Iranian economy. Human Rights Watch reiterated what humanitarian agencies have been saying over this past year, which is that banks refuse to allow their services to be used to transfer money even for humanitarian reasons.

The United States is welcome to trade or not to trade with any country that it wishes, but the stranglehold that it has on the financial system means that its direct and secondary sanctions prevent other countries from making trading decisions. In August, Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which works with Afghan refugees in Iran, said, "We have now, for a full year, tried to find banks that are able and willing to transfer money from donors." Egeland is not naive. He was the UN's undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief from 2003 to 2006. Squeezing the banks has allowed the US government to wreak havoc on Iran's ability to import food and medicines, impacting the human rights of Iranians.