News - Middle East: The UN relief chief says the world body is seeking humanitarian exemptions on Western sanctions against Iran through the Security Council.

The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, made the remarks while speaking at a press conference in Tehran on Tuesday following his talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

“Humanitarian agencies, and people like myself representing them everywhere in the world where there are sanctions, work very hard to mitigate the impact of those sanctions in humanitarian terms, and Iran is no different from anywhere else in that regard,” he said.

He added sanctions are applied in different ways “but our efforts to mitigate them do not differ in different countries, whether it is in Iran, in Syria, in Afghanistan or elsewhere.”

He also said that the UN relief bodies are very often assisted by decisions from key member states to provide an exemption through the Security Council and through humanitarian operations, saying, “We diligently pursue the implementation of those exemptions.”

Griffiths further said UN agencies have also in Iran imported medical and health supplies to make sure that they are usable and used for the people of Iran.

“Our interest in sanctions is not political, it’s humanitarian, and it just seeks to ensure where people need humanitarian aid, sanctions do not impede their access to that aid,” he concluded.

The United States under former president Donald Trump reinstated crippling sanctions on Iran after unilaterally walking out of the 2015 nuclear deal in May 2018, despite Iran’s full compliance with the terms of the agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Although Trump failed to achieve his professed goals with the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign, the waves of sanctions took a heavy toll on ordinary Iranians, including those battling life-threatening diseases.

The sanctions, maintained by Trump’s successor, have restricted the financial channels necessary to pay for basic goods and medicine, undermining supply chains by limiting the number of suppliers willing to facilitate sales of humanitarian goods to the country.

Iran has repeatedly denounced the sanctions as an act of “economic war”, “economic terrorism”, and “medical terrorism”.