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There has been considerable debate on who, and what agencies, should undertake assessments of the humanitarian implications of sanctions, especially when the sanctions are imposed by the United Nations. The report of the Interlaken Process (from which the draft text in section 6.2 above is drawn) cites past experience of the United Nations Security Council in requesting assessments from both the United Nations Secretariat and from Expert Panels.
The Report of the Stockholm Process on the Implementation of Targeted Sanctions identifies the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Expert Panels/Monitoring Mechanisms as entities capable of conducting assessments of humanitarian implications of sanctions.37
The choice of agency for undertaking such assessments should be guided by two criteria. First, the assessing entity should possess the expertise and knowledge to conduct an objective, impartial and rigorous assessment (see below). Second, the role of policing or monitoring sanctions compliance should be kept separate from the role of assessing humanitarian impact of the sanctions. The two tasks should be undertaken by different entities, as clearly they require different skill sets and areas of expertise.
Reliable assessments require not only a clear and traceable methodology, but skilled and experienced investigators. The following attributes represent desirable skills and qualifications of investigators for humanitarian assessments. The investigators should:
- Have experience and knowledge of sanctions assessment techniques and the recent developments in the sanctions debate, especially within the United Nations;
- Have experience in undertaking or contributing to humanitarian assessments;
- Be versant in the concepts and methods of epidemiology and public health, statistics, risk analysis and economics;
- Possess country-specific or regional expertise;
- Be aware of the potential for political manipulation in their interactions with important institutions or people involved;
- Maintain an effective and ongoing liaison with the commissioning entity (e.g. United Nations Secretariat/Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs);
- Be capable of clearly communicating the methodology and objectives of the assessment to those contributing to the study;
- Be sensitive to cultural differences, institutional hierarchies and the existence of formal/informal networks and special relationships when conducting the assessment.
In addition to the core assessment team members, additional research expertise can be drawn from various fields when necessary. National participants in sanctions assessments who have worked in local government bring special knowledge of data sources and can make more informed inferences about what the collected information means. In some cases, local participants can access confidential sources that are extremely useful in verifying “official” data.
National and local university academics are frequently wellinformed and have many valuable skills. Wherever possible, sanctions assessments should use contacts with these national counterparts to strengthen their independent analytical capacity. These local counterparts can play a critical role in ongoing or repeated assessments.
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