Secondary Economic Sanctions

Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human rights of both their compatriots or outsiders. Faced with this depressing catalogue of abuses, the international community’s response of choice consists in imposing economic sanctions on wrongdoers. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tackles primary sanctions where the sanctioning party (Sender) restricts economic relationships between, on the one hand, the sanctioned party (Target) and, on the other hand, agents of any nationality who are located on its own territory, or its own nationals wherever they are located – in other words, agents who are subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction. In this paper however I focus on unilateral secondary sanctions, whereby Sender seeks to restrict the economic activities of agents who are not subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction, on the grounds that they trade with or invest in Target. I provide a cosmopolitan defence of those sanctions as a means to stop ongoing grievous human rights violations. I proceed as follows. First, I outline the central tenets of cosmopolitan morality which I take for granted throughout this paper. I then mount my cosmopolitan defence of unilateral secondary sanctions. I end by rejecting the view that multilateral authorisation is a necessary condition for sanctions in general and secondary sanctions in particular, though I consider cases where such authorisation is warranted.