Congress, OFAC Should Address Humanitarian Aid Being Hindered by Sanctions, Aid Groups Say

Congress and the administration can take a more active role to allow humanitarian aid to better flow to sanctioned regions in Africa, which is often hindered from receiving that aid, charitable groups and sanctions experts told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa May 25. Some of the issues lie with licenses issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and a slow bureaucratic process that unintentionally slows aid shipments, they said.

“This is something that can be solved really easily with the right political will from the administration, from OFAC, from the president himself,” said Noah Gottschalk, the global policy lead for Oxfam, a global non-profit group working to end poverty. Speaking during a subcommittee meeting, Gottschalk urged Congress to call on OFAC to issue more general licenses and clearly outline exemptions for humanitarian aid to Africa, saying sanctions shouldn’t be impeding the aid.

“The intent of Congress was to make it easy for humanitarian aid to be delivered,” but presidents “clawed that authority back and issued these exemptions, which has flipped the script,” he said. “It has made it that we have to prove that our humanitarian aid isn't a problem as opposed to assuming that the bonafide aid that legitimate organizations, like ours, are giving to people is legitimate.”

Part of the problem is the lack of staffing and resources at OFAC to adequately manage its African sanctions regimes, Gottschalk said. Eric Lorber, a former Treasury official and a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said OFAC typically dedicates more resources to regions that pose the greatest national security threats. “That sort of explains why you would have Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc. as sort of the most comprehensive programs that we have in place,” he said.

But that also means OFAC sometimes doesn’t have enough officers dedicated to its African regimes where “big humanitarian operations” are taking place, Gottschalk said. “They can't move quickly enough to deliver the aid to save lives if they're waiting on the couple of people who are responsible to move these licenses forward,” he said.

While the U.S. has said it has worked to ensure some sanctions don’t impede humanitarian shipments (see 2102220049 and 2102100016), Bridget Moix, the executive director of the charitable organization Peace Direct, said even “well-intentioned” sanctions can “complicate” local aid efforts. “Individual sanctions on human rights abusers can be useful,” she said, “but will have little or could even have negative impacts if they're not part of a broader strategy coordinated with the international community.”