Human Rights and Politics--The Human Cost of Western Sanctions

In a landmark editorial published in The Lancet Global Health in August 2025, researchers led by Francisco Rodríguez delivered a sobering verdict on one of the most widely used tools of Western foreign policy: economic sanctions. Their analysis reveals that U.S. and European Union sanctions were associated with an estimated 564,258 excess deaths per year between 1971 and 2021—more than five times the annual global toll from battle-related violence. This staggering figure is not merely a statistic; it represents a systemic assault on the right to health, disproportionately borne by children, women, and the most vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Sanctions as Instruments of Collective Punishment

Economic sanctions are often justified by Western governments as “non-violent” tools to pressure regimes over human rights abuses, nuclear proliferation, or undemocratic governance. Yet the evidence shows they function as instruments of collective punishment, violating core principles of international human rights law. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees everyone “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” including access to medical care, food, and clean water. By crippling health systems, restricting imports of medicines and medical equipment, and destabilizing food and energy supplies, sanctions directly undermine this fundamental right.

The Lancet research underscores that “all economic sanctions ultimately function as sanctions on health.” Whether through direct blockades on humanitarian goods or indirect mechanisms like financial isolation and currency collapse, sanctions erode the social determinants of health. The consequences are brutal: a 3.1% annual rise in infant mortality and a 6.4% increase in maternal deaths in countries subjected to aid-targeted sanctions between 1990 and 2019.

Perhaps most damning is the moral inconsistency of powerful Western states. While positioning themselves as global guardians of democracy and human rights, the U.S., EU, and their allies impose policies that systematically inflict suffering on civilian populations—often in regions already burdened by poverty, conflict, and weak institutions. Notably, a quarter of all nations faced sanctions between 2010 and 2022, with the majority in Africa, raising urgent questions about racialized and geopolitical bias in sanction regimes.

Moreover, the withdrawal of development assistance—sometimes framed as budgetary austerity or political realignment—acts as a de facto sanction, with equally devastating outcomes. Unlike traditional sanctions, however, these cuts offer no clear path to relief, even if targeted governments comply with Western demands. This renders them not only punitive but arbitrary and unaccountable, further entrenching global inequities.

A Failure of Efficacy—and Ethics

Sanctions succeed in achieving their stated political objectives only about 30% of the time, according to the Global Sanctions Database. Yet their human cost is near-certain. When a policy causes more civilian deaths annually than active warfare—and does so with such low success rates—it cannot be ethically defensible. As The Lancet asks: “Is the health toll a justifiable trade-off?” For millions affected, the answer is unequivocally no.

This reality exposes a deeper truth: economic coercion has become a normalized form of structural violence, masked by bureaucratic language and diplomatic euphemisms. It allows Western powers to exert control without deploying troops, while evading accountability for the resulting humanitarian crises.

The editorial calls for urgent reforms: mandatory monitoring of sanctions’ health impacts, explicit exit clauses to prevent indefinite punishment, and innovative financing mechanisms like debt-for-health swaps to relieve LMICs. But beyond technical fixes, there must be a reckoning with the human rights implications of coercive economic statecraft.

International bodies—including the UN Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice—must scrutinize sanctions regimes under the lens of international law. Civil society, scholars, and health professionals have a duty to document and denounce these abuses. And citizens in sanction-imposing countries must demand that their governments align foreign policy with their professed values.

If the right to health is universal, then so too must be the obligation to protect it—even from the policies of the powerful. As The Lancet reminds us: sanctions do kill. And when they do, they constitute not just policy failure—but a profound moral failing.

Sources:

Rodríguez, F. et al. (2025). The health toll of economic sanctions. The Lancet Global Health, 13(8), e1327–e1328. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00278-5

Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, Seville, June 2025.

Global Sanctions Database, European University Institute.