Sanctions and the Right to Health: Structural and Foreseeable Constraints

Abstract

This article examines the impact of UN Security Council sanctions on the right to health and attempts to look beyond conventional analyses that focus mainly on the objectives and political legitimacy of sanctions by shifting attention from these concerns toward the actual mechanisms of their impact on fundamental rights. The main issue of this research is the gap between the legal design of sanctions and their practical consequences for access to essential health services and goods. While many sanctions regimes formally exclude humanitarian goods, including medicine, in practice, financial and banking restrictions, coupled with excessive caution by economic actors, cause serious disruptions in the supply chain of medical products and healthcare services. Using a legal-descriptive analysis method and relying on UN documents and case studies, this research shows that the violation of the right to health in the context of sanctions is not merely a random outcome, but a structural, predictable, and legally attributable consequence of the design and operation of sanctions regimes. In particular, the phenomenon of the indirect effects of sanctions, through the transfer of risk to private actors and their reduced willingness to engage with target countries, plays a decisive role in limiting access to health services. The findings of the article show that these effects, although indirect, are attributable to the structure of sanctions from an international law perspective and highlight the need to rethink their design and implementation. Consequently, the article argues that in order to ensure the compatibility of sanctions with human rights obligations, especially in the area of the right to health, it is inevitable to pay attention to their structural and foreseeable consequences.