Syria Support Movement solidarity with the Syrian people
from The News Desk at The Cradle, June 23, 2023
A group of British-Arab citizens have filed an application to the High Court in England seeking permission to proceed to a Judicial Review for the sake of ending UK sanctions on Syria, Al-Mayadeen reported on 23 June.
The leader of the group, Dr. Makram Khoury-Machool, who is the Director of the European Centre for the Study of Extremism in Cambridge, said, “As British citizens, we very much appreciate the existence of the separation of powers in the United Kingdom and the ability of the judiciary to scrutinize our government’s actions. Submitting this application is part of our strong belief in the British judiciary and in line with our civic and moral duties.”
The request follows the refusal of the UK Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development, James Cleverly, to end what the group calls the “cruel and unnecessary sanctions imposed on the Syrian Arab Republic for the last 11 years.”
The UK, US, and EU imposed economic sanctions on Syria at the start of the US-led covert war seeking to topple the Syrian government in 2011.
Though the violence has largely ended, Turkish and US forces, along with local proxies, continue to occupy large parts of Syria, including the country’s energy and wheat-producing regions. Denying the Syrian government access to these resources has exacerbated the sanctions, further impoverishing the Syrian populace and preventing post-war reconstruction.
In a press release, the activists emphasized that the sanctions have added to the suffering of innocent civilians in Syria following the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook both Turkiye and Syria in February of this year, killing more than 50,000 across both countries.
“The maintenance of UK sanctions in the face of the appalling suffering we are now seeing after the earthquake will intensify an already dire humanitarian situation and do nothing at all to assist Syria’s journey to stability, security, reconstruction, and development,” Dr. Khoury-Machool concluded.
At the time, several Western countries mobilized to send aid to help victims in Turkiye, but experienced difficulty doing the same for Syria due to the sanctions. The country’s economic difficulties due to sanctions also hampered the Syrian government’s response.
The group claims that UK sanctions on Syria are illegal and breach the rights of the applicants under the European Convention of Human Rights.
Economic sanctions have long been understood to be deadly for the civilian populations living under them, but are nevertheless still used by western powers under the pretext of helping civilians living under authoritarian governments.
Millions of innocent Iraqis suffered terribly, and hundreds of thousands died during the 1990s because of UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq.
In 1996, the US Secretary of State infamously said in an interview she gave to the US television program 60 Minutes that although some 500,000 Iraqi children had died from sanctions, this was a price worth paying to achieve the US policy goal of toppling Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
