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Sanctions as Chemotherapy: A Universal System of Monitoring to Assess the Humanitarian Health Impact of Sanctions | Ruth Gibson

Please confirm the time and date of the webinar at cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/cisac-events as dates and times may change.

Nations and international organizations increasingly turned to sanctions as a coercive policy tool against other countries to influence their behavior without relying on the use of force. Sanctions are the most common nonviolent geopolitical tool, and their use is expanding with explosive frequency. However, decades of health research on sanctions plead for the cessation of this tool because of the widespread human suffering caused by certain types of sanctions.

Dr. Ruth Gibson considers sanctions as the equivalent of a chemotherapy drug––one that should be planned, titrated, and continually evaluated to determine if the treatment is having the intended consequence or killing off essential functioning for sustaining life.

The goal in this work is to improve human health, minimize humanitarian harm, and design systems for monitoring sanctions that are realistic for use by the United Nations and the main sanction-sending nation-states.

This talk presents the developments of Stanford Medicine’s work with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop an analytic system capable of assessing the potential and actual humanitarian effects of sanctions in different international settings. For the last three decades UN monitors and lawyers have called for the development of a universal system of agreed-upon metrics for human health. A team of scholars and doctors at Stanford Medicine is responsible for guiding the developments related to human health, specifically maternal and child health. There is an urgent need for a framework that would allow both sanctioning countries and international monitors to foresee and document the impacts of specific sanctions on human rights, including health, so that those impacts can be avoided or mitigated. Dr. Gibson will outline how we are designing the maternal and child health system of indictors for

Jun 6, 2023 01:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)