Sanctions can lead to as many fatalities as armed conflict, with unilateral penalties linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, Bloomberg reported, citing a new analysis published in The Lancet.

The study published in The Lancet Global Health journal found that unilateral and economic sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union cause a significant rise in mortality, with children under five years old being disproportionately affected.

It highlights that sanctions can severely undermine public health systems and hinder the ability of humanitarian organizations to function effectively, thereby contributing to an increase in fatalities.

The researchers determined that unilateral sanctions result in over 560,000 deaths annually across the globe, a figure that aligns with their estimated range for yearly fatalities caused by armed conflict, which was derived from previous studies and their own analysis.

“Woodrow Wilson referred to sanctions as ‘something more tremendous than war.’ Our evidence suggests that he was right,” authors Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot said, adding, “It is hard to think of other policy interventions with such adverse effects on human life that continue to be pervasively used.”

Global, economic, unilateral sanctions linked to higher deaths

The researchers, with funding from the progressive think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, analyzed mortality rates across age groups during sanctions episodes in 152 countries from 1971 to 2021.

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The study employed four distinct econometric approaches to isolate the causal link between different types of sanctions and increased mortality rates, with all methods consistently showing that global, economic, and unilateral sanctions correlate with higher death counts, while United Nations sanctions did not demonstrate any statistically significant association with increased mortality.

The study additionally defines "global sanctions" as encompassing all types of penalties, while "economic sanctions" specifically refer to trade and financial restrictions, and "unilateral sanctions" are those imposed solely by either the US or the EU.

The authors note that UN sanctions may have less severe effects because they're designed with measures to minimize civilian harm, whereas US sanctions often aim to force regime change or political shifts, leading to worsening living conditions in targeted countries.

Exemptions don't reduce sanction damage

“Many times, a rogue regime will blame sanctions for all the problems of its country,” Hughes Habbar sanctions lawyer Jeremy Paner told Bloomberg before seeing the study, adding that “it’s easy to blame the US or Brussels.”

Paner, a former lead sanctions investigator at the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), expressed skepticism about the study's findings while stressing that OFAC actively works to facilitate humanitarian operations in countries under sanctions.

Rodríguez, the study's lead author and a specialist in sanctions and the Venezuelan crisis, responded that despite humanitarian exemptions permitting aid entry into sanctioned countries, significant delivery challenges persist, as financial institutions and nonprofit organizations frequently refrain from engaging with sanctioned nations even when aid-related transactions are technically permitted.

Challenges persist

“Saying, ‘I’m going to block your oil exports, but I’m going to allow you to continue importing humanitarian goods,’ is almost like saying to somebody who has just lost their job, ‘Don’t worry, you can still go into the store and buy whatever you want,’” Rodríguez told Bloomberg.

The academic debate about sanctions' impact on mortality has persisted for decades without conclusive evidence establishing this connection, though Joy Gordon, a sanctions expert at Loyola University Chicago, noted that The Lancet study presents a methodologically rigorous and persuasive case demonstrating how sanctions directly increase mortality rates among all age groups.

The study's authors called for greater caution in implementing sanctions, particularly given their dramatic expansion in recent decades, with data from the Global Sanctions Database showing that while only 8% of nations faced US, EU, or UN sanctions during the 1960s, this proportion surged to 25% of countries between 2010 and 2022.