Human Rights Sanctions in International Law: A Marxist Perspective

Human rights play a seemingly contradictory role in today’s sanctions debate. On the one hand, states and international institutions frequently invoke the protection of human rights as a legal and moral justification for imposing sanctions. States and international institutions invoke human rights to justify sanctions, but they also serve as a reason against them, especially when sanctions lead to severe human rights crises. This dual role makes it difficult for international law to render a clear judgment on legality. A Marxist approach can be significant here, as it allows this indeterminacy to be understood as a structural feature of a legal order shaped by competing moral claims and power imbalances. This thesis asks to what extent a Marxist analysis should endorse the use of economic sanctions as a means of protecting fundamental human rights. It seeks to contribute to sanctions scholarship and to Marxist legal research by treating the indeterminacy of the legality of human rights sanctions and the incoherence of international human rights law as a critical space for rethinking the relationship between human rights and international law.