On Sunday, I was on OBETV, an Africa-focused channel broadcast on satellite. It was a recording of an Economist newspaper debate with His Excellency Isaac Osei (Ghana’s High Commissioner to the UK), Oxfam’s Phil Bloomer, and Professor Shujie Yao, Chair of Economics at Middlesex University. I argued that human rights are consequences of economic development, and that sanctions, by depressing economic development, tend to also damage greater recognition of human rights:
Tags: cuba, fidel castro, ghana, obetv, oxfam, united nationsBetween 1914 and 1990, there were economic sanctions imposed in 116 cases by various countries. They totally failed to achieve their stated objectives in 66 percent of those cases and were at best only partially successful in most of the rest. Since 1973, the success ratio for economic sanctions has fallen to 24 percent for all cases.
In 1962 the United States imposed sanctions against Cuba. JFK bought dozens of boxes of Cuban cigars before he signed the Cuban embargo.
Forty-three years later, Fidel Castro is still in power, freedom of expression and association is still restricted, and Castro gets to blame his country’s poverty on the Americans. American sanctions have reduced investment into Cuba, hindering living standards there, but of course Cuba has trading relationships with the rest of the world, so they are a rather weak form of sanction.
Yet multilateral UN sanctions seem to fare little better. Sanctions against Iraq are widely said to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths of children. Were they worth it? They did not bring forth democracy, they did not get Saddam Hussein’s co-operation with weapons inspectors, they did not cause Saddam any suffering whatsoever. They solely hurt the ordinary people. “Economic embargoes,” said the late Pope John Paul II, “are always deplorable because they hurt the most needy.”