Alena Douhan in Iran

18 May 2022

The UN Special Rapporteur’s quiet visit to Iran (May 7-18, 2022) unexpectedly fell on turbulent days. In the middle of her 11-day stay, Iranians took to the streets to protest the sudden rise in food prices.

As we write this column, police have shot dead at least six protesters in various cities. The victims’ names were later released. Government officials have cut off or severely slowed down the Internet in multiple cities to prevent news coverage and video uploads. The clips published on social media so far are reminiscent of the national protests of 2017-2018 and November 2019.

The presence of Professor Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Negative Impact of Unilateral Sanctions on the Human Rights Situation, amid the government’s violent crackdown, has created a paradoxical situation. State news agencies have welcomed Alena Douhan’s visit and published positive reports on her recent missions. Independent human rights activists in Iran, however, are worried. 

Ms. Douhan’s reports interpret the harmful effects of Western unilateral sanctions on the human rights situation in peripheral countries but, unfortunately, do not cover human rights violations at the hands of those countries’ rulers. It is how her office’s mission is defined. Professor Douhan has previously carried out similar missions in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Qatar, and Syria. She has said she does not believe that corruption in Zimbabwe is the result of sanctions alone. She also denies allegations that she allied with the country’s rulers to condemn the West. From the international law perspective, will her expert report on Iran benefit the people or the rulers?

Some human rights activists in Iran, including Jafar Azimzadeh, secretary of the board of the Free Trade Union of Iranian Workers, are concerned that Ms. Douhan’s report could become a propaganda tool for the rulers of the Islamic Republic to deny their responsibility for the current situation, to demand lifting the sanctions while continuing their repressive policies domestically and abroad.

• A petition, 12 May 2022, Letter from Civil Society Activists in Iran to the UN Special Rapporteur

The Zimbabwe report indicates that Professor Douhan is aware of the dilemma and has probably requested a meeting with independent activists in Iran. And the authorities no doubt have tried to put her in information quarantine and dictate their demands. Her position poses a moral challenge to Iranian human rights activists.

Must we, the victims of the Islamic Republic, insist that sanctions continue until the human rights situation in Iran improves? Or the very existence of sanctions, regardless of the IRI repressive regime, because of their adverse effects on the lives of ordinary people, violates human rights - unemployment, high inflation, lack of medicine, bankruptcies of small and large businesses, etc.? Ms. Douhan specializes in international law. She is not a politician, she says. What she will report will be technical and specialized. But we believe it will inevitably take on a political character.

The rulers, the clerics, the IRGC, the vast security apparatus, and allies among the state technocrats, managers, and looters of the private sector are Iran's biggest human rights violators. Does this situation justify the sanctions and consequently harmful effects of sanctions on people's lives?

What is the difference between "unilateral" economic sanctions (for example, by the United States) and sanctions adopted by the United Nations? Which is compatible with international law? Why does a government believe it has the "right" to impose unilateral sanctions?

What is the legal justification for second-tier or secondary sanctions from the point of view of international law? Secondary sanctions are the transnational punishment of institutions, corporations, and companies that violate primary sanctions, seemingly engaging in some sort of commerce with the sanctioned country.

Professor Douhan says sanctions are often imposed because the sanctioned government has violated the rights of its people and should be punished. But her research shows that sanctions make citizens worse off, the same people who were supposed to be "saved" by sanctions.

The outcome of sanctions can be studied from two perspectives: the efficacy and the humanitarian effect. In the 1990s, UN Security Council widely imposed sanctions on some countries, including Iraq. Alena Douhan says numerous academic studies and reports by human rights organizations agree that the sanctions have achieved little efficacy but have had devastating consequences for millions of people, prompting a review of UN practice. Her research shows that unilateral primary and secondary sanctions, applied with double standards to particular countries, are often not in response to "injury to the conscience of humanity" but for strategic goals and geopolitical interests. Does international law have rules in this regard? Alena Douhan says, according to her research, primary and secondary sanctions pursue political goals, and that "human rights" are only an excuse to disguise strategic and ideological interests. Sanctions violate the human rights of those affected by them at various economic, political, and civil levels, equivalent to the devastations of war.

The insistence on the continuation of maximum sanctions is further raised by the conservative and right-wing Iranian political forces in the diaspora who have been rooting for "regime change" for three decades. They welcome the consequences of the maximum sanctions: sanctions disrupt the normal functioning of the Islamic Republic and facilitate its collapse, they claim. Moreover, according to the logic of the diasporic conservatives, people's increasing dissatisfaction with their economic problems will provoke an uprising against the regime, and this is a "positive" development that should be encouraged and accelerated. The legal premise of Professor Douhan's mission is entirely contrary to these assumptions. Her report will highlight the "negative" effects of sanctions, further deteriorating Iranians' human rights and citizenship status.

Everyone seems to agree on one point, though: if we had a democratic government, the effect of sanctions on the situation of human rights would certainly not have been so abhorrent. Perhaps sanctions would not have been imposed on Iran at all.

If Alena Douhan's report confines itself to mentioning the harmful effects of sanctions on the human rights situation and omits several times more human rights violations perpetrated by the rulers of the Islamic Republic, we are facing a one-sided report. On the one hand, it will rightly call for the lifting of sanctions that worsen the well-being of ordinary people but, on the other hand, remains silent in the face of the same hardships that come directly from the political repression and economic looting committed by the rulers. It will end up in favor of the rulers and the looters.