Iran Press/America: “The rules are complicated, and businesses that run afoul of them can incur huge penalties,” Richard Nephew, who helped administer the system during the Obama administration, said.
“The risks of engaging in this trade are high,” he added. “The costs are high, too. And the benefits are pretty marginal,” Los Angeles Times reported.
This is while the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other US officials claim that sanctions allow exceptions for humanitarian aid.
The US sanctions don’t just prevent Iran from selling oil, its only major source of foreign income. They don’t only stop Iran from buying weapons or nuclear technology.
They also make it difficult for Iran to buy food, medicine, and medical supplies on the open market — which is what Tehran needs now.
On paper, the sanctions allow exceptions for humanitarian aid, mainly food and medical goods. Pompeo and other US officials point to those clauses as proof of their benevolence toward Iran’s beleaguered people.
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But that’s not how the sanctions — which cover foreign companies as well as US businesses — work in practice.
There are easier ways for a medical supply company to make a profit — especially during a pandemic that already has taken more than 100,000 lives.
And for most international banks, shipping companies, and insurers, humanitarian shipments to Iran are too small to be worth the risk.
That helps explain why applications for special permits to sell medicine and medical equipment to Iran have plummeted since Trump took office — from 176 in the last quarter of 2016 to 24 in the last quarter of 2019.
Regulations make it easy to sell some medical supplies to Iran, but not others
Special permission is required to export oxygen generators and full-face respirators, equipment often needed for intensive care of COVID-19 victims, because they could potentially be used for nonmedical purposes.
There’s an easy way the Trump administration could ease those problems with making the existing rules for humanitarian shipments clearer and easier to use.
That’s the core of a proposal last week by 24 former US and European officials, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Democrat, and former Sens. William Cohen of Maine, John Danforth of Missouri and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, all Republicans.
It won’t help its chances at the White House, but Joe Biden, the president’s likely Democratic opponent, has endorsed the proposal.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently stressed the need to lift all US unilateral and illegal sanctions against Iran, Zarif added despite Iran's scientific capabilities, sanctions and US preconditions for preventing the sale of drugs and medical equipment have made difficulties over efforts to combat the spread of the coronavirus in Iran.
Despite the outbreak of the deadly Coronavirus worldwide and the need to fight it all out, the United States insists on its sanctions within the framework of maximum pressure policy against Iran and repeatedly imposing new sanctions against Tehran.
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