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15/1/2000

POSITION PAPER ON IRAQ SANCTIONS

This paper urges the Australian Government to reconsider its policy of supporting these sanctions and to instead work at the international level for the urgent lifting of the sanctions. It labels as 'disproportionate and indiscriminate' the economic sanctions imposed against Iraq after the Gulf War a decade ago.

Appealing to Catholic moral teaching, the paper says that all coercive measures, whether military in nature or not, must observe the letter and the spirit of humanitarian law.

It says: 'As with other coercive measures, sanctions should not have indiscriminate or disproportionate effects on the civilian population. The suffering and premature deaths of untold numbers of children and rising numbers of maternal deaths in Iraq bear witness to the failure of the UN imposed sanctions to meet these criteria.'

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