Humanitarian Exceptions and Sanctions

The paper briefly outlines the tension between sanctions and the protection of human rights and presents humanitarian exceptions as one of the tools to overcome this tension. It shows that humanitarian exceptions are already part of the legal regulation of sanctions at the international level, within the UN and the EU, as well as within individual states. Nevertheless, there is still no agreed definition of humanitarian exceptions, and the concept is understood and labelled in different ways. Based on a broad working definition of humanitarian exceptions as any exclusion from a sanction regime motivated by humanitarian concerns, the paper proposes two ways of classifying such exceptions, based on substantive and procedural criteria respectively. The paper also shows that humanitarian exceptions have so far mostly been designed in an ad hoc, context-specific manner and as such constitute a diverse and heterogeneous category. To overcome this diversity and heterogeneity, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2664 (2022) introducing a standing exception for impartial humanitarian actors to all UN sanction regimes. Heralded as a historic shift in the evolution of sanctions, the resolution has certain built-in limitations, mostly related to its narrow scope of application, which are likely to prevent it from becoming a truly effective tool for defragmentation of the sanction system.