“Economic sanctions have become an increasingly favored tool of international relations over the last several decades, but they have also become increasingly controversial”, observers Professor Martin. “This is particularly the case for sanctions that are not authorized by the United Nations Security Council (so-called “autonomous” or “unilateral” sanctions), and which either have a severe and widespread impact on the population of the targeted state, or which target “innocent” third states or other entities to deter them from interacting with the target state (so-called “secondary sanctions”).
Like other Western states, and regional organizations like the European Union, Canada has developed robust sanctions regimes during this period, not only to implement United Nations (U.N.) Security Council resolutions, but also to engage in autonomous action in response to human rights violations, gross corruption, and nuclear proliferation.
Professor Martin noted: “While there has been recent discussion in Canada regarding the wisdom and effectiveness of such sanctions, or indeed whether Canada should be more aggressive in its use of sanctions, there has been far less analysis of the international law issues raised by an increasing reliance upon this foreign policy tool. This report is an effort to provide that analysis.”
The report provides a detailed analysis of the several international law regimes implicated by economic sanctions, and assesses the various possible legal objections to the different kinds of economic sanctions. But in closing, the report also identifies a troubling inconsistency between Canada’s stated purpose for many of these sanctions – namely, to force other states to address widespread human rights violations within their territory – and the potential for such sanctions to compound the deprivation and suffering of the very people the policy is aiming to help.
What is more, these sanctions are more broadly defended as an effective tool for upholding and enforcing the rule of law, yet there has been a reluctance to consider whether certain aspects of these economic sanctions regimes are indeed unlawful, and that they may be thereby actually undermining the international rule of law. As Martin writes in the Report:
“The possibility that a policy [economic sanctions] can be challenged as violating and undermining the very legal regime that it is claimed to be defending and advancing, obviously creates the grounds for allegations of irrationality and hypocrisy—and indeed, Canadian sanctions policy has been challenged at the United Nations on just that basis in the past.”
The report concludes that there remain a number of unsettled aspects regarding the lawfulness of autonomous economic sanctions, and suggests that this calls for caution in considering the scope and application of Canadian economic sanctions policy. It further recommends that decisions in this regard be informed not only by the specific international law issues implicated by autonomous sanctions, but also by the broader rule of law principles and ethical values that Canada has long espoused both at home and abroad.