Analysis On International Law Issues Of Economic Sanctions Of The United States

The essence of economic sanction is a kind of compulsive behavior, The traditional view of self-limit economic coercive measures did not violate international law. Economic sanctions initiated under the framework of multilateral in the United Nations are the policy tools to stop illegal acts, to the maintenance international order. But in this paper, The author analyzed the behaviors of United States of America, the main initiator and participator of the world economic sanctions. It comes to a conclusion that, even in the case of multilateral participation, economic sanctions may be illegal attributed to the reasons that they are out of the jurisdiction and unreasonable.This paper is divided into five parts. The first part discussed the nature and definition of economic sanctions and to distinguish between similar concepts.The second part describes briefly the situation of USA economic sanctions. USA is one of the countries which most frequently use economic sanctions in the world, as international law after World War Ⅱ abolished states’right to wage a war, USA has always attached importance to its strong economic strength to pursue its foreign policy, under pressure from the international community, USA also continuously improved its economic sanctions’forms, to assist the political and military action with minimum cost.The third part respectively discusses cause behavior and sanction behavior. The goal to initiate sanctions is the realization of national foreign policy objectives, but economic sanctions not only has the instrumental characteristics, but also its own independent values. Therefore, in the analysis of the legitimacy of economic sanctions, they will be divided into cause behavior and sanction behavior, in these two kinds of behaviors exist the legal problems. This part has shown characters of America economic sanctions in international law by through typologically analyzing and then, comes to a conclusion for every period of sanctions by classification.The fourth part discusses the legal problems on international law of USA economic sanctions. International law does not have mandatory to prohibit economic sanctions. But different countries have different understandings of concepts in economic sanctions, different scale of jurisdiction determines sanction is legal or not, meanwhile, humanitarian crisis caused by the improper behavior of the sanctions will be legal obstacles to economic sanctions.The fifth part is to summarize, It proposed that includes American, unilateral sanctions behavior of all states sponsored will eventually be replaced by multilateral mechanisms. The feasible way at this stage is to pass the record to the United Nations to achieve legitimacy.