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"Hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer—and hundreds of thousands have died—even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States."
As human rights defenders marked the 75th anniversary of the Fourth Geneva Convention and its prohibition on collective punishment, hundreds of legal experts and groups on Monday urged the global community—and the United States government in particular—"to comply with international law by ending the use of broad, unilateral coercive measures that extensively harm civilian populations."
In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, the jurists and legal groups wrote that "75 years ago, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, nations of the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland to establish clear legal limits on the treatment of noncombatants in times of war."
"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare."
"One key provision... is the prohibition of collective punishment, which is considered a war crime," the letter continues. "We consider the unilateral application of certain economic sanctions to constitute collective punishment."
Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild—one of the letter's signatories—said in a statement that "economic sanctions cause direct material harm not only to the people living on the receiving end of these policies, but to those who rely on trade and economic relations with sanctioned countries."
"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare and hold the U.S. Government accountable for violating international law every time it wields these coercive measures," she added.
The new letter states:
Collective punishment is a standard practice of U.S. foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions. While other countries apply sanctions in some form, the United States imposes more unilateral economic sanctions than any other country in the world, by far. Though this method of collective punishment may differ from that of conventional warfare, and is often applied outside of declared military conflict, its collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive, and deadly.
"Hundreds of millions of people currently live under such broad U.S. economic sanctions in some form, including in notable cases such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela," the letter notes. "The evidence that these measures can cause severe, widespread civilian harm, including death, is overwhelming. Broad economic sanctions can spark and prolong economic crises, hinder access to essential goods like food, fuel, and medicine, and increase poverty, hunger, disease, and even death rates, especially among children. Such conditions in turn often drive mass migration, as in the recent cases of Cuba and Venezuela."
For more than 64 years, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that had adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government
claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. For the past 32 years, United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Last year's vote was 187-2, with the U.S. and Israel as the only dissenters.
According to a 2019 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017-18 to U.S. sanctions, which have made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.
"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent," the new letter asserts. "A 1960 State Department memo on the embargo of Cuba suggested 'denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.'"
"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent."
"Asked whether the Trump administration's sanctions on Iran were working as intended, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded that 'things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we're convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime,'" the signers added.
Experts have repeatedly noted that while sanctions harm everyday people in targeted countries, leaders of those nations use their positions as dictators to enrich themselves and members of their inner circles. Sanctions also fail to work as intended to topple targeted regimes. Cuba's revolutionary government has outlasted a dozen U.S. presidents. Iran has been under U.S. sanctions since the late 1970s, yet its Islamic regime remains entrenched and has forged closer relations with Russia and China. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is still in power despite two decades of U.S. sanctions. North Korea's dynastic dictatorship shows no signs of cracking after seven decades of sanctions.
Others have highlighted the hypocrisy of the United States sanctioning nations over ideological differences while supporting brutal dictatorships including Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Equatorial Guinea, and other gross human rights violators like apartheid Israel, which is on trial for genocide at the World Court. Instead of punishing Israel, the U.S. House of Representatives—with the assent of dozens of Democratic lawmakers—passed legislation to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor is seeking to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders.
"The Geneva Conventions, for all of their limitations and subsequent violations, were a triumph of international law in the protection of civilians during times of war," the new letter asserts. "Yet today, hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer—and hundreds of thousands have died—even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States."
"As members of the legal community, we call on the United States to comply with existing international law by ending the use of broad unilateral coercive measures," the signers added. "Seventy-five years after the Geneva Conventions, collective punishment must end."
Cuban and American officials are investigating the unverified claim that the doctors, who were kidnapped by al-Shabaab militants in 2019, died during a recent U.S. drone strike.
The United States military said Tuesday that it is investigating whether a drone strike on Somalia targeting al-Shabaab fighters killed two Cuban doctors being held hostage by the militant group.
According to al-Shabaab, surgeon Landy Rodríguez Hernández and general medicine specialist Assel Herrera Correa were killed in a U.S. airstrike in Somalia's southern state of Jubaland last Thursday—although there has been no confirmation of the deaths.
"The aerial bombardment, which began at around 12:10 am, targeted a house in Jilib, instantly killing Assel Herrera and Landy Rodríguez," the al-Qaeda-affiliated group said on social media.
The Cuban Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that National Assembly President Esteban Lazo Hernández traveled to Kenya "to make urgent efforts with the highest authorities of that country in the search for cooperation and clarification, in the light of the recent published news on the possible unconfirmed death" of the two doctors.
U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) acknowledged carrying out the February 15 bombing but said that "we do not have further information at this time about these reports, but we do take all claims of civilian casualties seriously. The command will continue to assess the results of this operation and will provide additional information as available."
According to Airwars, a U.K.-based monitoring group, hundreds of Somalis—including some civilians—were killed by U.S. airstrikes last year alone as the Biden administration quietly continues the so-called War on Terror launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The U.S. has been conducting airstrikes and ground raids in Somalia since the George W. Bush administration.
Al-Shabaab kidnapped the Cuban doctors in Mandera County, Kenya in April 2019. The doctors were working there under an agreement between the Kenyan and Cuban governments for the provision of medical professionals for services including the implemention of universal healthcare.
Cuba's socialist government provides universal healthcare to the Caribbean country's citizens and also deploys doctors to dozens of nations on humanitarian missions. While Cuban doctors are hailed around the world for their lifesaving service, they also allegedly face serious restrictions on their freedoms while working abroad.
Responding to news of the doctors' possible deaths, Cuban President Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel y Bermúdez said: "I express all my solidarity and affection to the families of our doctors Assel and Landy, in these moments of uncertainty and increased pain, and in the face of the tragic news not yet confirmed, in whose clarification we are working hard with international authorities."
"I admire the strength of both families and I remember with great affection our previous meetings," he continued. "Assel and Landy represent the noble and generous spirit of a people who share even what they do not have, with the humble of the Earth."
"Cuba does not lose hope of finding them alive," Díaz Canel added. "We will do so as long as there is no official confirmation that they have died."
A Cuban diplomat, meanwhile, slammed "those who for years have supported each and every one of the policies and practices of Israel, which denied the existence of the Palestinian people and their rights."
An attorney from the U.S. State Department told the International Court of Justice on Wednesday that it should not put its weight behind global calls for Israel to withdraw its forces from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Richard Visek, the U.S. State Department's acting legal adviser, argued that "it would not, as some participants suggest, be conducive to the achievement" of lasting peace for the United Nations' highest court to "issue an opinion that calls for the unilateral, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal that does not account for Israel's security needs."
"The court should not find that Israel is legally obligated to immediately and unconditionally withdraw from occupied territory," said the U.S. representative.
Visek reiterated the Biden administration's stated support for a two-state solution but rejected the argument—made by other nations before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—that an end to Israel's illegal, decadeslong occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem is a necessary prerequisite to securing peace and a durable political solution.
"International law does not impose specific time limits on an occupation," Visek said Wednesday.
The U.S. presentation came two days after Paul Reichler, an American lawyer representing Palestine during the ICJ proceedings on Israel's occupation, said that "occupation can only be a temporary state of affairs" and criticized the U.S. government for defending "whatever offenses against international law Israel commits."
"A permanent occupation is a legal oxymoron," said Reichler. "What makes Israel's ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territory unlawful is precisely its permanent character."
Among nations participating in the ICJ proceedings on Israel's occupation, only the U.S. and Fiji are urging the court not to issue an opinion that declares the nearly six-decade occupation of Palestinian territory illegal.
Israel has opted not to take part in the hearings, with far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denouncing them as illegitimate.
The hearings come more than a year after the U.N. General Assembly requested a nonbinding opinion from the ICJ on the "legal consequences" of Israel's open-ended occupation of Palestinian territory. Just last month, the ICJ ruled that Israel's ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip plausibly amounts to genocide—a characterization that the U.S. and other Israeli allies have rejected.
Speaking just before Visek on Wednesday, representatives of Colombia, Cuba, and Egypt condemned the Israeli occupation and implored the ICJ to act decisively.
“The situation that is taking place in the eyes of all confirms the ongoing genocide. Innocent victims—girls, boys, women—number in the thousands," Cuban diplomat Anayansi Rodriguez Camejo said Wednesday, slamming "those who for years have supported each and every one of the policies and practices of Israel, which denied the existence of the Palestinian people and their rights."
"Taken in total," she said, "the unbearable situation of the Palestinian people the honorable International Court of Justice should take a stand in the clearest, strongest, and most forceful legal terms in support of international law."