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Unilateral and Illegal Sanctions – Mainly by the United States – Kill Half a Million Civilians Per Year
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of ScheerPost
Posted: August 23rd, 2025
https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/unilateral-and-illegal-san...
According to the Global Sanctions Database, the United States, European Union, and UN have sanctioned 25% of the countries in the world. The United States by itself sanctioned 40% of these countries, sanctions that are unilateral because they do not have the assent of a UN Security Council resolution. In the 1960s, only 8% of the world’s countries were under sanctions. This inflation of sanctions demonstrates that it has become normal for the powerful North Atlantic states to wage wars without having to fire a bullet. As US President Woodrow Wilson said in 1919 at the formation of the League of Nations, sanctions are ‘something more tremendous than war’. The cruellest formulation of Wilson’s statement was made by Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the UN, regarding the US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. From 1990 to 1996, sanctions ... resulted in the excess deaths of over 500,000 children under the age of five. The number of people who die because of sanctions is greater than the number of battle-related casualties (106,000 deaths per year) ‘and similar to some estimates in the total death toll of wars including civilian casualties (around half a million deaths per year)’. The most vulnerable population groups, as you would expect, are children under five and older people. Deaths of children under five years ‘represented 51% of total deaths caused by sanctions over the 1970–2021 period’.
Note: The above article is largely based on an article published in The Lancet titled "Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis." Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption.
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