Thank you very much for the invitation to comment on these issues.
I've selected a couple of general questions with which I'm most familiar.
I'll give you a little bit of additional background. I've been working on the issue of primarily United Nations targeted sanctions over the course of the past 15 to 16 years, and a consortium of a group of colleagues, both academic and policy practitioners, including some from the Canadian foreign affairs department, have participated in what we call the targeted sanctions consortium. It was about 50 individuals around the world looking at the impacts and effectiveness of the UN targeted sanctions from 1990 to the present. In fact, we just published a book this past year called Targeted Sanctions: The Impacts and Effectiveness of UN Action, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.
I'm going to reflect on that work, primarily focused on the UN, but I've also worked more recently serving as a member of an EU task force on EU sanctions against Iran, Russia, and Syria.
I want to focus on a couple of points. First is the question in the briefing memo about the use of sanctions and how it has evolved over time. I'll make four brief points about this.
First, today there has been a significant increase in the frequency with which sanctions have been applied. There are more UN sanctions in place today than at any time in the UN's history, at least in this past year. Even though some have described the 1990s as the so-called sanctions decade, there were twice as many UN sanction regimes in place in 2016 as there were at any point in the 1990s.
There are also record numbers of European Union and U.S. sanctions in place. After the termination of the sanctions against Siberia and Côte d'Ivoire, the United Nations has 14 sanctions regimes in place. The European Union has 38 sanctions regimes in place. The United States has 28 different sanctions regimes in place. Sanctions appear to have become a policy instrument of choice.
The second point, in terms of trends and evolution, is that all sanctions regimes today are targeted in some form. Even the U.S., although it may retain some comprehensive measures, has not applied any new comprehensive sanctions since 2000.
There are different types of targeting. You've already heard references to individual targeting. There's individual and corporate entity targeting. There's targeting on one sector of economic, diplomatic, or military activity. There is some targeting that is in fact focused on simply territories of the target country rather than on an entire country, or areas under the control of a rebel group in a country.
I don't know whether anyone there is familiar with this, but I believe the Canadian government has used something called SanctionsApp, which is an app for mobile devices, available also online, for evaluating the impacts and effectiveness of UN sanctions. We now have a menu of 76 different variations of UN-applied restrictions over the last 25 years. These are different measures.
A point that came up in the first presentation dealt with a question about what we call the challenge of keeping targeted sanctions targeted, and this is something that I've heard frequently. It's not just a Canadian problem, by the way. It's a problem in many other countries where private sector firms are having difficulty with regard to the implementation of the measures and keeping them targeted.
In our research, we have come up with a scale of combinations of targeted measures, because it's hard to single out the effects of a travel ban versus an asset freeze versus a sectoral measure. We look at the combination of measures in place by any given centre, and we've developed a five category set of classifications, almost like, I suppose you could say, hurricane classifications. Category one is just individual measures. Category two is diplomatic or arms embargos. Category three refers to sectoral, particularly commodity sanctions measures. Category four is relatively non-discriminating sectoral measures, such as sanctions on oil, sanctions on the financial sector, or sanctions on shipping. Category five would be comprehensive trade embargos.
We were interested in analyzing and trying to understand the challenge of keeping a measure, which may be designed either in New York, Brussels or Ottawa to be a targeted measure targeted and keeping the political goals and objectives consistent with what firms are logically going to do in the spot, and so on.
A third point about how sanctions have evolved is that we've seen—and this is a positive story, I think—an increase in the sophistication of sanctions regimes over time. There's been significant improvement in the specificity of language. This is particularly with reference now to United Nations sanctions. There were nicknames being used for designations in the 1990s. Today the UN is trying to bring its designations to what they call its OFAC standard, which is based on the U.S. Treasury model and uses biometric identifiers, Arabic script, rather than transliterations and so on in the designations criteria.
There's also been some policy learning that's gone on. I would say that the application of measures of financial asset freezes in advance, basically giving a target a warning two weeks before that they should change their policy or we will impose a financial ban or an asset freeze, obviously gives them enough time to move their assets to other locations. There has been some learning. The UN no longer threatens an asset freeze in advance of its application.
We've also seen standardization of language, routine practices, and standardized language for exemptions that we see across one UN Security Council resolution to another. Quite significantly, Canada, among others, supported this particular position. There have been, in my view, significant improvements in legal protection for individuals and for firms that have been designated with the creation of the office of the ombudsman at the UN. We've seen similar types of developments within the EU, particularly in the actions by the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.
The fourth trend or evolution that we've seen over time is an increase in the complexity of sanctions regimes. I mentioned earlier that just in looking at sanctions regimes from 1990 to the present, we've seen 76 different varieties of restrictive measures. When we updated our app for 2016, which has just been released this past week for the DPRK and Iran in particular—Iran now being different from the DPRK.... The latest resolution on North Korea is so complex that we've had to develop an entirely new typology to understand it. Where there were outright sanctions, restrictions, or prohibitions on activities, now there are conditional measures indicating that if a country has reason to suspect a violation of the sanction, then it is legally required to take action. This might then apply to its firms. These are what we call conditional measures. The resolution includes additional measures that states are encouraged to consider. I think this is creating additional complexity, that is even building on some of the comments from the first speaker this afternoon.
If there's time, let me briefly say something about whether or not sanctions work, since that's the most common question we're usually asked about this. We're focused primarily on United Nations sanctions. I'd like to make one or two points about the effectiveness of sanctions.
Yes, sometimes they do work, but we need to understand and remember that sanctions are never applied in isolation. UN sanctions are always applied in combination with other policy instruments and most often with negotiation or mediation. Sometimes we hear in the public discourse an argument that we keep on applying sanctions, but we should negotiate. Most often, or almost always, sanctions are embedded in a negotiating or bargaining framework.
In our own analysis of the effectiveness of measures, we argue that the effectiveness varies according to the purposes of sanctions. We differentiate between three broad purposes of sanctions.
The first is to coerce a change in behaviour. That's typically the goal of many sanctions regimes. We oftentimes will see that's one of the principal objectives. We find, in our research, that coercing a change in behaviour through the application of sanctions is rarely effective not only on its own, but even in combination with other measures. It's very difficult to coerce a target to change behaviour, but if you're trying to constrain a target from engaging in some kind of proscribed activity, we find that the sanctions increase in their effectiveness by almost a factor of three.
We also argue that sanctions are important instruments to send a signal. They're more than just words, because they're words backed by costs self-imposed on the target and costs imposed on the sender. We find that in general we do not have as much effectiveness in coercing changes in behaviour, but oftentimes sanctions can play a significant role in changing the nature of forces on the ground or constraining an actor from undertaking actions that are proscribed by the international community more generally.
As one final point on unilateral versus multilateral sanctions, most research has concluded that multilateral sanctions are more effective than unilateral sanctions, particularly if they're UN sanctions backed by political will. These are the most effective, the most legitimate, and by some standards the only legal sanctions—but I think there are others that are legal—and both the EU and to a lesser extent the U.S. legitimize their individual unilateral sanctions measures in terms of prior United Nations decisions.
We also see that recent experience has shown that coordinated action by like-minded countries can significantly enhance the impacts and effectiveness of sanctions. Consider for example the coordinated actions undertaken that have gone beyond just the UN sanctions, particularly with regard to Iran. I'm happy to elaborate on our analysis of the JCPOA, or a similar report that we just finished for Rasmussen Global group on an analysis of the coordinated sanctions applied against Russia over Ukraine.
I'm happy to provide the committee with additional information and to answer any questions. I'd also like the opportunity to comment on the very interesting presentations of my predecessors at this time.
Thank you.