Economic Sanctions and Human Rights: Quantifying the Legal Proportionality Principle

The benchmarks of necessity and proportionality are constants across different interpretations of the proportionality principle. Both rest on empirical premises-with the necessity test involving a prognostic effectiveness assessment and the proportionality test assessing the actual effects of the sa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Harvard human rights journal 2023-01, Vol.36, p.1
Main Authors: Steinbach, Armin, Gutmann, Jerg, Neuenkirch, Matthias, Neumeier, Florian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Debates
Human rights
International law
Sanctions
Unilateralism
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The benchmarks of necessity and proportionality are constants across different interpretations of the proportionality principle. Both rest on empirical premises-with the necessity test involving a prognostic effectiveness assessment and the proportionality test assessing the actual effects of the sanctions. This Article examines these empirical premises and inquires more generally into the potential, and limitations, of quantitative assessments in the application of international law. To that end, we employ econometric techniques to explore the proportionality of U.S. sanction episodes between 1976 and 2012. Our results cast doubt on the effectiveness of sanctions aimed at human rights improvements. Furthermore, the results refine the judgment of sanctions' (un)proportionality by distinguishing the impact on specific types of rights; and they inform the debate on unilateral versus multilateral as well as targeted sanctions. More generally, our analysis can inform the debate on the application of proportionality in the field of international law and we outline challenges in importing quantitative standards into the proportionality assessment.
ISSN:1057-5057
1943-5088