Some interesting news today on the sanctions front, so it’s time for another Export Law Blog grab bag:

• The Iranians aren’t very happy about the sanctions imposed yesterday by the Treasury Department on the Export Development Bank of Iran (“EDBI”), so they issued a press release decrying the sanctions. According to the Iranians, the sanctions were imposed “as a propaganda move in order to cover up the consequences of the recent American economic crisis.” That, I guess, would explain why yesterday’s entire news cycle was dominated by the sanctions on EDBI and absolutely no coverage was given at all to to the the decline of the Dow Jones or other economic news. The Iranians also threatened to file complaints with unnamed “relevant authorities.” Let’s see how well that works out for them.
• At the same time the U.S. is tightening sanctions on Iran, the U.S. continues to lay the groundwork for a U.S. “interests section” in Tehran. This would be the first time the U.S. has had a diplomatic presence in Tehran since the 1979-81 hostage crisis. According to this report by McClatchey Newspapers, the Bush administration intends to announce these plans in mid-November. No word yet on whether Iran is on board with this idea, although Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last month that he’d consider the idea.
• Cuba has announced that its recently-discovered oil reserves have 20 billion barrels of oil instead of the 5-10 billion previously estimated. To put this number in context, the U.S. has estimated reserves of 29 billion barrels. This has caused some skeptics to scoff that the new estimate is “off the charts” and might simply be a ploy to rekindle investor interest despite falling oil prices. Even so, there are reports of proposals on the Hill to exempt U.S. oil companies from the embargo so that they could get a piece of the action. Embargo hardliners are countering with proposals to prevent executives of foreign companies that drill in Cuba from visiting Disneyland.

Posting was light last week because I was speaking at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania Law School being conducted by the law schools Journal of International Law. The symposium was titled “Trade Sanctions in a 21st Century Economy: Are They An Appropriate Or Effective Means Of Altering State Behavior?” and had as featured speakers, among others, Gary Hufbauer, who has done more research on the impact of economic sanctions, both unilateral and multilateral, than almost anyone else. He is the lead author of Economic Sanctions Reconsidered which analyzes most modern cases of economic sanctions and provides factual support for some important, if not surprising, conclusions, namely that sanctions sometimes work, but more often than not they do not achieve their desired results and that multilateral sanctions are more likely to be successful than unilateral sanctions.

Also speaking was Professor Orde Félix Kittrie, currently a visiting associate professor of law at the University of Maryland who was on a panel discussing the humanitarian impact of economic sanctions. He unashamedly advanced the argument that the humanitarian impact of economic sanctions imposed on Iran and North Korea didn’t matter. In Professor’s Kittrie’s view, it might be necessary to starve a few North Korean and Iranian civilians to prevent their governments from killing a bunch of Americans with a nuclear device.

My presentation, which you can download here, was not quite as controversial. I looked at two methods used by the United States to bootstrap the effectiveness of unilateral sanctions — namely, secondary sanctions and prosecution of foreign nationals for extraterritorial violation of U.S. sanctions — and discussed whether they were consistent with our WTO obligations and with basic principles of international law regarding prescriptive jurisdiction.