Trump’s Sanctions on Cuba Are a Crime Against Humanity

Can economic sanctions constitute crimes against humanity (CAH)? The proposition may appear audacious to those who deny that economy can be wielded as a weapon of aggression. Yet emerging legal doctrine recognises that deliberately imposed measures attacking civilian livelihoods constitute an international crime.

A blatant example is US President Trump’s Executive Order of 1 May 2026 (May EO) targeting Cuba under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). On its face, the May EO ‘expands upon’ Executive Order 14380 of 29 January 2026 (January EO) in addressing the presumed ‘Cuban threat’ to US national security. However, whereas the January EO threatened third states with secondary unilateral coercive measures (UCMs), colloquially ‘sanctions’, in the form of tariffs, the May EO threatens to block the property of any foreign natural or legal person, including foreign financial institutions, engaging in virtually any economic activity in Cuba or with the Cuban Government.

The rationale is manifest: the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v Trump denied Trump the power to impose tariffs under the IEEPA against sovereign states without congressional approval—thereby rendering his initial threat to deprive Cuba of oil groundless under US federal law. The White House therefore reformulated its menace, replacing tariffs with asset ‘blocking’, and sovereign states with persons, to achieve the same outcome: regime change.

The two EOs nevertheless share two essential characteristics: they prima facie violate customary international law and constitute CAH, such that third states are bound to breach them. Establishing this obligation requires first clarifying why the US UCM regime against Cuba is unlawful.

Prima Facie (Il)legality of US UCMs Under International Law

Former UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of UCMs on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan defines (¶ 5) UCMs as economic, financial, political or other State-oriented measures imposed on states, individuals or entities to alter policy, subordinate sovereign rights, secure advantages, or coerce and punish. Their distinguishing feature is that they lack UN Security Council authorisation and are prima facie illegal insofar as they infringe customary international law including the principles of state sovereignty (¶ 19), non-intervention and peoples’ right to self-determination (¶ 6).

The crucial point here is their combined effect. ‘Comprehensive’ UCMs target entire sectors of the sanctioned economy, whereas ‘targeted’ UCMs focus on persons or bodies through asset freezes, travel bans and funding prohibitions. Yet, as Moret, Hofer and Jazairy (¶ 16) note, ‘targeted’ measures may produce ‘comprehensive’ effects when those persons or bodies play a vital role in the sanctioned economy. ‘Secondary’ UCMs then amplify that effect by pressuring third states and private entities to comply with open-ended diktats regardless of their domestic or international legality, thereby inducing (¶ 17) overcompliance and further isolating the targeted state.

Trump’s May EO is therefore a mixed instrument. Although the blocking threat appears directed at persons, the prohibited conduct broadly concerns foreign economic activities in Cuba, extending from energy to tourism and mining following the US Office of Foreign Assets Control’s updates on 4 and 11 June 2026. This reinforces the existing blockade, including restrictions on vessels trading with Cuba and threats of lawsuits against non-US companies for ‘trafficking’ in nationalised property. The May EO is thus best understood as a de facto ‘comprehensive’ UCM package with ‘targeted’ and ‘secondary’ elements.

The decisive issue, however, is the purpose and humanitarian cost of the US UCM regime against Cuba. Even before Trump’s EOs, the blockade had caused a neuropathy epidemic between 1991 and 1994 and contributed to syringe shortages during COVID-19, despite Cuba developing its own vaccine and deploying doctors abroad. The Trump administration’s 2026 EOs have since attacked the island’s energy infrastructure, triggering hospital blackouts, water shortages, scarcity of food, sharply rising infant mortality and falling child cancer survival rates.

This calamity reflects a longstanding US objective. As noted by US diplomat Lester Mallory in a 1960 memorandum, UCMs against Cuba aimed to make ‘the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government’. This objective was reiterated in the early 1990s by Congressman Robert Torricelli, who boasted that his bill would ‘wreak havoc on that island’ and ‘strangle’ its government. The nexus between the systematic acts, intent and consequences has therefore long been evident.

The IEEPA nevertheless stands apart from most other US UCM statutes. Unlike the better-known Global Magnitsky Act—which influenced the European Union’s (EU) ‘Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime’ and targets alleged human rights violators through ‘targeted’ UCMs with limited (¶ 6) due process guarantees—the IEEPA requires no ‘human rights’ rationale, empowering the US President to adopt UCMs based on a broadly construed national emergency. Recent EOs promulgated under the IEEPA thus deter third states and persons from economic activity in Cuba by threatening their access to the US market, thereby forcing economic withdrawal and deepening imposed destitution. Yet, understanding why this amounts to CAH requires tracing the evolution of legal doctrine on ‘comprehensive’ UCMs since the 1990s.

UCMs Under International Human Rights Law and International Criminal Law

Since the mid-1990s, expert views on UCMs have shifted from condemning interferences with state sovereignty to assessing their impact on human rights, paving the way for international criminal scrutiny. This early link between ‘comprehensive’ UCMs and international crimes was grounded in socioeconomic rights: General Comment No. 8 of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1997), for instance, clarified how such measures impaired rights to food, healthcare, education and work, including by affecting pharmaceuticals, sanitation supplies, food quality, and clean drinking water.

This raises the central question: how should conduct that knowingly subjects civilians to indigence and illness, against the backdrop of the US UCM regime’s stated objective, be classified? As corroborated by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea (¶ 78), such conduct falls within the definition of CAH in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), including ‘murder’, ‘persecution’ and ‘other inhumane acts […] intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health’, where committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, with knowledge of that attack.

The above framework produced two doctrinal approaches. A more ‘conservative’ position, associated with Nigel White, emphasised US state responsibility and reparations for violations of Cuban citizens’ socioeconomic rights, while avoiding international criminal law. By contrast, Alfred De Zayas (¶ 36) and William Schabas drew on the intent behind ‘comprehensive’ UCMs and the foreseeability of their deadly effects, arguing that measures causing starvation and disease could amount to CAH—with De Zayas comparing them to ‘medieval sieges’.

Despite the scepticism expressed by Bjorge, Akande and Akhavan, Cuba’s case better supports De Zayas and Schabas. The US policy of engineered immiseration, directed against large sections of Cuba’s civilian population to overthrow their government despite its documented human toll, satisfies the contextual elements of CAH, while the hampering of humanitarian aid further evidences the attack’s systematic character.

This broader interpretation of CAH has also gained diplomatic traction—informing, for instance, Venezuela’s February 2020 referral to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC on whether US UCMs amounted to CAH. Accountability remains unlikely, given ICC structures and Venezuela’s inability or unwillingness to challenge the Prosecutor’s cursory assessment before the Pre-Trial Chamber following the US abduction of President Maduro. Even so, debates on the International Law Commission’s (ILC) Draft Articles on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity suggest that UCMs now warrant closer scrutiny under the CAH framework.

UCMs and the ILC’s Draft Articles

The ILC’s Draft Articles on CAH were first published in 2019, coinciding with De Zayas and Schabas’ participation in the International Seminar on UCMs. Yet, despite exploring contested questions such as ‘political offences’ vis-à-vis extradition and ‘gender’ as a social construct forming the basis for ‘persecution’, the Draft Articles did not tackle the relationship between CAH and economic policy.

This omission was noted in Iran’s initial submissions, which argued for specific reference to ‘comprehensive’ UCMs under Draft Article 2, defining CAH. Like De Zayas and Schabas, Iranian representatives argued that such measures, when applied systematically and on a widespread basis, deprive civilians of food and medicine and thereby intentionally inflict death. Notably, representatives of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia and China later joined their Iranian counterparts in reiterating this position at the Preparatory Committee for the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Humanity, convened in January 2026.

Irrespective of the (geo)politics behind this convergence, the alignment of two Permanent Members of the Security Council on the criminal nature of ‘comprehensive’ UCMs may shape future UN agendas and resolutions. More importantly, the ILC’s commentaries affirm that the ‘interdiction’ of CAH is a jus cogens norm: states should therefore not ‘merely’ prohibit CAH; they must act to prevent them.

The question is therefore plain: if preventing ‘comprehensive’ UCMs against Cuba is a binding obligation, how should our governments react to Trump’s EOs?

The Erga Omnes Obligation to Breach the Blockade

As the ILC’s Draft Conclusions on Identification and Legal Consequences of Peremptory Norms of General International Law confirm, states are required to ‘bring an end through lawful means’ to any serious breach of a jus cogens obligation and must not ‘recognise as lawful’ a situation created by such a breach. The logical conclusion is reflected in the January 2026 Briefing Paper (1) of the International Court of Justice: the prevention of CAH constitutes an obligation erga omnes. Applied to ‘comprehensive’ UCMs, this means that third states should not only refrain from supporting the bloqueo, but also actively try to breach it.

At the time of writing, only Russia had openly ‘violated’ the January EO, while the conduct of Chinese and Turkish companies was arguably in contravention of the May EO. Regardless of the reasons behind US inaction in relation to these ‘transgressions’, the EOs have continued to daunt third governments—particularly in Latin America.

In this regard, the EU’s position had been largely compliant with international norms since the EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement (PDCA) of 2016, which envisaged inserting Cuban enterprises ‘into international markets’ and ‘investments’, while Council Regulation No 2271/96 facilitated this agreement by allowing European companies to recover damages caused by US extraterritorial UCMs, including the bloqueo. Yet the European Parliament’s (EP) resolution of 21 January 2026 aligned with Trump’s subsequent January EO by declaring that Cuba ‘cannot continue to benefit from privileged cooperation with the EU, such as under the PDCA’. Instead of heeding calls made by UN human rights experts since January 2026 and upholding the agreement, the EP doubled down on its US-aligned position in its resolution of 18 June 2026, demanding further ‘targeted’ UCMs against Cuban entities, including the ‘leadership’ of the state-run Grupo de Administración Empresarial (GAE). Given GAE’s weight in the Cuban economy, such a measure would arguably be de facto ‘comprehensive’, especially when operating in tandem with the bloqueo.

It is worth noting that these resolutions are not binding. However, as the Trump administration threatens military aggression and progressively expands the bloqueo, European lawmakers should consider not only third states’ obligation to breach the blockade, but also potential criminal liability under the ‘other inhumane acts’ heading of CAH—regardless of geopolitical alignments and Washington’s power rhetoric.

Concluding Remarks

Despite the growing consensus on the looming demise of the liberal international legal order, the socioeconomic foundations of settled international law remain. Preventing CAH in the form of economic aggression is therefore not only an obligation on paper: it is a practicable humanitarian policy.

Third states therefore face a historic choice amid the humanitarian catastrophe imposed on Cuba: will they defy an illicit decree to end a systematic assault on civilians, or will they participate in the suffocation of 10 million people? The answer will not only determine Cuba’s survival, but also the meaning of sovereignty and self-determination in the emerging legal order.