The International Legal Dimension of Economic Sanctions

Abstract

International law embodies the rules, principles and processes that regulate the conduct of states and international organisations (Higgins, 1994, 2–3). As discussed in Chapter 1, Chapter VII of the UN Charter empowers the Security Council to require states to restrict and interdict economic relations with target states, entities, or individuals.¹ Outside the UN Charter or other applicable treaty, the customary international law of state responsibility regulates how, and the conditions under which, a state may impose economic sanctions.

Once therefore it is understood that law is a function of a given political order, whose existence alone can make it binding, we can see the fallacy of the personification of law implicit in such phrases as ‘the rule of law’ or ‘the government of laws and not of men’. ‘Law cannot be self-contained; for the obligation to obey it must always rest on something outside itself. It is neither self-creating, nor self-applying

E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1st edn, 1939) p. 229