The US defends the right to impose unilateral sanctions if there are blockades at the UN

U.S justified his recourse to sanctions dictated unilaterally in the face of what he called “the blockade on occasions of the Security Council of the UN”, after criticism from Russia Y China, who consider that with measures like these the role of the Council is distorted.

The Council debated today, at the proposal of the Russian presidency, the regime of sanctions imposed on 14 regimes and their leaders, and served again to exemplify the enormous discrepancies between the three permanent member countries of the Council (and with the right to veto) on the weapons of foreign policy to influence the decisions of third countries.

The Russian Chargé d’Affaires, Dmitry Polyanskiy, considered that these sanctions – which range from trade embargoes to freezing bank assets or including people on a blacklist – “go against international law”, “are an interference in internal affairs of the states” and are in short “inhuman actions”.

Polyanskiy specifically referred to the different sanctions imposed by the United States against Syria, Belarus, Cuba (which suffers, in his words, “economic terror” after a 60-year embargo) and Iran, and recalled that now the threat of sanctions is hovers over Burma and Mali because the coup plotters have imposed themselves on those two countries after their seizure of power in 2021.

With less coarse words, the Chinese ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun, said that the imposition of unilateral sanctions is equivalent to “pretending to overlap the Security Council”, but they are nothing more than a “concrete manifestation of the paternalism of some nations” that “seem be addicted” to those measures that do nothing but “aggravate pre-existing crises.”

In her turn, US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield defended herself by saying that her country always prefers that the Council impose sanctions, but “sometimes its work is undermined by its own members (she did not mention names) and the Council is blocked in its work to protect international peace and security.”

“There are members who use these debates to criticize member states and say that sanctions are illegal. We categorically reject it: our sanctions do not violate international law, they are legitimate and legal tools,” he assured. In addition, he supported that other actors, among which he cited the European Union (EU) and the Community of West African States, also impose the sanctions they consider appropriate.

For the ambassador, sanctions are used to pressure countries on three issues: violations of human rights, corruption and nuclear proliferation, something that she considered means “applying the UN charter.”

Another voice was raised in the Council against sanctions in general, unilateral or collective, and it was that of Gabon, which stressed that there are eight African countries affected by these measures; His representative stressed that they are generating great discontent among the African population and this leads to “growing distrust in the UN.”