New York, February 19, 2025—As a tool of foreign policy, sanctions have historically been deployed by one or more states to coerce a change of behavior or policy. In recent years, however, states have increasingly imposed sanctions on actors responsible for human rights violations, which has expanded their potential to advance transitional justice goals. Today, ICTJ is releasing a new report that considers this potential as well as the obstacles to justice sanctions may engender.
“Of Two Minds: Sanctions as a Form of Accountability and the Dilemmas for Transitional Justice” explores the role that international economic sanctions regimes can play in both advancing and hindering accountability, redress, and prevention. “In societies grappling with mass atrocities, particularly those still without a political transition underway and where impunity for these crimes remains pervasive, sanctions can help fill this justice vacuum by providing a measure of accountability,” explains Elena Naughton, ICTJ senior expert and author of the report.
For victims of human rights abuses, sanctions can offer a degree of repair, by acknowledging them and the violations they experienced, reinforcing the rule of law, and affirming the truth of what happened. Sanctions can also mark the beginning of a process to recover assets that can in turn be used to redress the harms they suffered. As a result, civil society, victims’ groups, and human rights defenders are often among sanctions’ main proponents.
The report, however, also examines the serious challenges to justice that sanctions can pose. For starters, economic sanctions can have a devastating humanitarian impact on a country subject to them. Often, those hit hardest by such sanctions are the very communities and individuals who suffered human rights abuses. In addition, as one civil society actor working in Libya interviewed for the report puts it, “Sanctions limit civil society’s ability to work. In addition to victims, it is civil society who struggles.”
Meanwhile, those actors whom the sanctions are intended to target might successfully evade them, further entrenching a culture of impunity and emboldening the authoritarian government to which they likely belong. Sanctions have also been weaponized to undermine international criminal accountability, as in the case of U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court.
“Another major challenge for sanctions is related to their legitimacy,” Naughton says. “For instance, a sanctions regime may have limited or no intended effects, which makes them difficult to justify. Or, a state imposing sanctions on ‘bad’ actors may do so selectively, punishing some but letting others off the hook, which also undermines their credibility.”
Given these realities, in many situations, controversy both precedes and follows the imposition of sanctions, including when they are under consideration, implemented, and lifted—controversy that increased coordination among sanctioning authorities and justice actors may help avoid.
The report then identifies and scrutinizes those aspects of sanctions that overlap with transitional justice goals and where practitioners might take advantage of synergies. To this end, it provides recommendations for the United Nations, justice actors, and sanctioning authorities for better coordination. “Sanctions no doubt have their limitations and challenges,” says Fernando Travesí, ICTJ’s executive director. “But, it is important to not lose sight of the affinities they have with transitional justice processes, and their potential to contribute to accountability and reparation.”
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PHOTO: Left, protesters demonstrate against U.S.-imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in front of the United States Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe, on October 25, 2024 (Tafara Mugwara/Xinhua/Alamy Stock Photo). Right, thousands of people in London demonstrate against the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 26, 2022 (Amani A/Alamy Stock Photo).
