Assessment of the Effects of Economic Sanctions on Iranians’ Right to Health by Using Human Rights Impact Assessment Tool: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: Over the years, economic sanctions have contributed to violation of right to health in target countries. Iran has been under comprehensive unilateral economic sanctions by groups of countries (not United Nations [UN]) in recent years. They have been intensified from 2012 because of international community’s uncertainty about peaceful purpose of Iran’s nuclear program and inadequacy of trust-building actions of this country. This review aimed to identify the humanitarian effects of the sanctions on the right of Iranians to health and the obligations of Iran and international community about it. Methods: To assess economic sanction policies and identify violated rights and the obligations of states according to international human rights laws, in this study, Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIA) tool is used. Applying this tool requires collection of evidences regarding the situation of rights. To provide such evidence, a systematic review of literature which involved 55 papers retrieved from the web-based databases and official webpages of Iran’s government and UN’ health and human rights committees and organizations was done. All articles about the consequences of economic sanctions related to nuclear activities of Iran on welfare and health of Iranians published from January 2012 till February 2017 in English and Persian languages were included. Search terms were economic sanctions, embargoes, Iran, welfare, health and medicine. Additional studies were identified by cross checking the reference lists of accessed articles. All selected papers were abstracted and entered into a matrix describing study design and findings, and categorized into a framework of themes reflecting the areas covered (health and its determinants). According to HRIA framework, related obligations of Iran and other states about adverse effects of the sanctions on Iranians’ right to health were extracted. Results: The sanctions on Iran caused a fall of country’s revenues, devaluation of national currency, and increase of inflation and unemployment. These all resulted in deterioration of people’s overall welfare and lowering their ability to access the necessities of a standard life such as nutritious food, healthcare and medicine. Also, the sanctions on banking, financial system and shipment led to scarcity of quality lifesaving medicines. The impacts of sanctions were more immense on the lives of the poor, patients, women and children. Humanitarian exemptions did not protect Iranians from the adverse effects of sanctions. Conclusion: Countries which imposed economic sanctions against Iran have violated Iranians’ right to health. International community should have predicted any probable humanitarian effects of sanctions and used any necessary means to prevent it. Furthermore, Iran should have used any essential means to protect people from the adverse effects of sanctions. Now, they should work on alleviation of the negative effects of sanctions. Even though, some of the effects such as disability and death cannot be compen...

Ensuring adequate health financing to prevent and control the COVID-19 in Iran

“…However, due to Iran's sanctions, many health sector activities that require financial exchanges and transactions are in many cases not possible [7]. Many countries around the world, the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) have called for the lifting of sanctions to better deal with the disease [8]. Despite all these problems, the government in Iran has been working to provide new funding to address the COVID-19 [2,4].…”

“…Governmental funding in Iran is mainly dependent on oil revenues, which have declined with the increasing prevalence rate of the COVID-19 and the slump in global production, and oil prices have fallen to their lowest level in the last decades [3,8,9]. This is equivalent to reducing income and creating new costs due to the burden of disease.…”

Time for more evidence: a scoping review of the effects of sanctions on Iranian health

“…Studies show that sanction hardly meet their goal in changing the target's political behavior, and instead they have considerable impact on economic indices such as gross domestic product (GDP) and domestic production [5,6], access to healthcare facilities and medicine, [5] poverty indices [7,8] and they clearly violate basic human rights. [9,10] The Islamic Republic of Iran is second largest country in the Middle East with almost 82 million inhabitants. Two historically remarkable events during past half a century have been the Islamic revolution in 1979, and eight year of war with Iraq, ending in 1988 [11,12] First sanctions against Iran were imposed in 1951, following the nationalization of the oil industry and exit from the Anglo-Iran Oil Company.…”

“…A report shows that Iran had been the target of over 35 sanction resolutions in 1979-2012, which regarding the number, ranks the top in the world. [9] Most of the sanctions were at the command of the president of America, and member states of the United Nations have had positively voted for four of them. Since 2005, after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reviewed Iran's atomic program, sanctions changed in form and intensity, and the UN declared new sanctions in order to affect Iran's uranium enrichment program.…”

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