Instrumentalizing Human Rights through Iran-Related Sanctions (UNSC & EU, with US Financial Constraints, 2006–2025): Humanitarian Exemption and Sanctions for Civilians

Economic sanctions have become one of the most widely used instruments of international pressure, ostensibly designed to promote human rights and compel compliance with international norms. The Iran-related sanctions regimes imposed by the United Nations Security Council and the European Union between 2006 and 2025, operating within a financial environment profoundly shaped by United States secondary sanctions, present a case in which the declared humanitarian commitments of sanctions diverge sharply from their foreseeable consequences for civilian populations. While these humanitarian costs are increasingly documented, the structural mechanisms through which civilian harm is produced, and the legal frameworks that simultaneously acknowledge and fail to prevent it, remain insufficiently examined. This thesis asks to what extent the UNSC and EU sanctions regimes against Iran, through the structural inadequacy of humanitarian exemptions, selective enforcement and tolerated circumvention, and the amplifying effect of authoritarian governance, foreseeably harm civilians while distributing legal responsibility so diffusely that no single actor is fully accountable, providing legal cover for both the sanctioning powers and the sanctioned State to evade accountability. Drawing on doctrinal analysis of Security Council resolutions, EU restrictive measures, US secondary-sanctions instruments, and the law of State responsibility, alongside UN Special Rapporteur reports and economic and human-rights documentation, it argues that the regime constitutes not merely a case of implementation failure but a system of legitimated harm: an architecture that speaks the language of humanitarian protection while foreseeably producing civilian harm, relying on private over-compliance and de-risking, and dispersing responsibility across sanctioning States, international institutions, private actors, and the Iranian State. The thesis develops an analytical framework combining the instrumentalization of human-rights discourse, understood as political-economic co-optation rather than individual bad faith, diffused responsibility, and authoritarian amplification, through which external pressure is redistributed onto civilians and exploited domestically for legitimation. Tracing the mechanisms of harm, from correspondent-banking withdrawal and payment bottlenecks to pharmaceutical supply disruptions, it identifies a cyclical accountability vacuum in which foreseeable civilian harm is owned by no one. Criticizing the sanctions does not defend the Iranian State; rather, the same harm becomes usable by both sides while answerable by neither. The thesis accordingly argues for an account of sanctions accountability that moves beyond the state-centric frame and ensures that humanitarian exemptions operate as genuine protections rather than instruments of geopolitical legitimation.