News - Middle East: Iran’s top rights official says the unilateral US sanctions on the Islamic Republic amounts to a crime against humanity, as they severely undermine the basic rights of the entire nation.

Kazem Gharibabadi, the secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, made the remarks while addressing an international human rights conference in Tehran themed the impact of sanctions on patients’ health.

“Experts view the sanctions as a warfare tool, as the bans impact whole nations and ordinary people suffer from them,” he said. “The sanctions are also acts of genocide, as they sometimes target certain groups of people, including special disease patients.”

Gharibabadi said the broad Western bans violate various rights of people, including their right to life, food, healthcare, education, development, and a free trial.

“The sanctions have blocked 150 to 200 billion dollars in Iranian oil revenues over the past years. When the oil sale of a country is banned, it is the development of the infrastructure of that country that they want to destroy,” he said.

“They blacklist people without providing any evidence or giving them any chance to defend themselves,” he said.

Need for legal action against sanctions

Gharibabadi cited a May report on the impact of anti-Iran sanctions by Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on human rights.

The Iranian official said the report shows the US threats have forced banks, insurance firms and transport companies to shy away from cooperating with Iranians, rendering the so-called humanitarian exemptions issued by the US practically useless.

“The Americans block money transfer channels and threaten insurance firms not to cooperate with Iran. What they write on paper is something and what they do is something else,” he said, referring to the US claim that drug imports are not subject to its sanctions.  

The official condemned Western states for their double standards on human rights.

“If a small incident happens in a developing country, some countries who impose and implement sanctions shout [slogans in support of] human rights, but if thousands of people lose their lives to such sanctions, they just don’t care,” he said.

Gharibabadi called for the creation of campaigns against the sanctions, and urged for efforts to enable victims of the bans to file lawsuit against those behind the bans in international and national courts.

Source: Press TV