HRW Blasts US for Refusal to Ease Sanctions on Iran amid Growing Pandemic

By Staff, Agencies

Human Rights Watch [HRW] strongly criticized the United States for its refusal to lift sanctions on Iran amid the new coronavirus outbreak.

In a reports published on Monday, the organization asserted that international law obliges any country imposing sanctions on another to “consider the impact on the human rights of the affected population, especially regarding their access to goods essential to life, including medicines and food.”

The broad bans “are negatively affecting the Iranian government’s ability to adequately respond to the mounting health consequences of the coronavirus [COVID-19] pandemic,” said the HRW.

Washington “should take immediate action to ease US sanctions and expand licensing of sanctions-exempt items to ensure Iran’s access to essential humanitarian resources during the pandemic,” the body added.

The virus can lead to a potentially fatal respiratory disease, called Covid-19. HRW cited figures released by Iran’s Health Ministry on March 19 that showed almost 50 people contracted the virus every hour and one person died of it every 10 minutes in Iran.

While Iran is battling the fast-spreading outbreak, the Trump administration refuses to ease up its “maximum pressure” campaign against the country.

Earlier, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s wrote to the United Nations and his counterparts last month, urging them to ignore the coercive measures.

HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth called it “wrong and callous” for the Trump administration to retain the measures.

Detailing the fallout from the bans, the body said severe international banking restrictions have adversely affected Iran’s ability to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines and medical equipment. These include Washington’s sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank that “seriously threatened the flow of exempted humanitarian trade to Iran.”

Although, the US claims that it has exempted humanitarian supplies from the sanctions, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control [OFAC] has cut the number of its so-called “general licenses” for Iran-headed exports from more than 50 percent to 10 percent, HRW said.

The death toll in Iran from the coronavirus outbreak has reached 3,739, including 136 people who had lost their lives over the past 24 hours, Health Ministry Spokesman Kianush Jahanpur said on Monday.

The total number of people infected by coronavirus in the country has reached 60,500, he said. So far, 24,236 patients have recovered and been discharged from hospital, he added.