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Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

First Page

123

Abstract

The article searches for a comprehensive moral framework by which to evaluate United States Security Council sanctions. It explores the goals of UNSC sanctions, finding that they largely match the goals of criminal punishment. It then concludes that the discourse of human rights, frequently deployed to justify sanctions, actually confounds these goals. For instance, where a sanction aims to deter, reform, incapacitate, punish, or exclude a state that violates human rights by denying political liberties, the sanction is usually protracted and is comparatively the least likely to its goal. Procedurally, a sanction fails in this situation because of a catch-22. it aims to cure the citizenry's lack of political power, yet that political power is a prerequisite to affecting the change the sanction seeks. Normatively, it fails because the target state, non-democratic as it is, does not share the sanction's value set. For similar reasons, citizens in a liberal democracy may, under certain very narrow circumstances, be collectively responsible for their state's actions, but citizens in a non-democratic state could almost surely not be so responsible. Yet sanctions are costly, and most of their costs are borne by poor, disenfranchised individual citizens in non-democracies. Therefore, justifying sanctions in terms of human rights may require calling for sanctions even where they are bound to be long, futile, and misdirected. Or, more surreptitiously and more perniciously, the theorist may dodge this dilemma by narrowing his or her list of "human rights' to exclude political rights. Since neither result is acceptable, the human rights language is counterproductive. In its place, the article embraces a framework sensitive to the sanctions' underlying goals while aspiring toward liberal democratic accountability and international political legitimacy.

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