U.S. humanitarian policy toward Iran is under scrutiny as the European Union calls for more details about a new U.S. trade mechanism aimed at shielding exports of food and medicine to Iranians from U.S. sanctions.
Conflicting evidence also has emerged about whether the Trump administration’s previous system for facilitating humanitarian trade with Iran has helped or hurt the Iranian people.
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In a study published Tuesday, New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch criticized the Trump administration’s previous system of exempting humanitarian trade from U.S. sanctions, saying it had “failed to offset the strong reluctance of U.S. and European companies and banks to risk incurring sanctions and legal action by exporting or financing exempted humanitarian goods.”
HRW said that reluctance to trade with Iran meant U.S. sanctions “drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines, causing serious hardships for ordinary Iranians and threatening their right to health.”
Our @hrw report on the impact of US sanctions on Iranians right to health is out. The report doesn’t aim to settle a contentious political debate, but instead we hope to add a clear human rights framework to discuss an issue essential to everyday Iranians: https://t.co/TeTBoTRwHNpic.twitter.com/KFSuFV5GRp
— Tara Sepehri Far (@sepehrifar) October 29, 2019
HRW researcher Tara Sepehri Far tweeted that the study found “no current acute nationwide shortage of medicine and medical equipment” in Iran. But, she wrote that “patients suffering from specialized and rare diseases … and who are dependent on imported medicine are already feeling the negative effects and the situation could get worse.”
In a research note published on Wednesday, U.S. policy institute Foundation for Defense of Democracies said it had found evidence that U.S. sanctions have not disrupted Iranian imports of pharmaceuticals from the European Union, a major medicine supplier to Iran.
FDD said data provided by Eurostat, the EU statistical office based in Luxembourg, show Tehran imported $357 million of pharmaceutical products from EU countries in the first half of 2019, an increase of 2.5% compared with the first six months of 2018.
The Trump administration began significantly tightening sanctions against Iran in November 2018, six months after withdrawing from a 2015 deal in which world powers offered Iran sanctions relief in return for restrictions on its nuclear program. U.S. President Donald Trump said the deal was not tough enough on Iran and vowed to pressure the Islamic Republic into agreeing to a new deal to stop its perceived nuclear weapons ambitions and other malign activities.
Iran has said its nuclear ambitions are for peaceful purposes and has vowed to resist the U.S. sanctions.
This article originated in VOA’s Persian service.