Geneva accords pledge to ease humanitarian transactions for Iranians
The P5+1 is still trying to figure out how to keep its promise to facilitate Iranian purchases of food and medicine and other humanitarian trade.
While attention has focused on the amount of sanctions relief Iran will receive under last weekend’s breakthrough nuclear agreement, for many Iranians the biggest benefit might come from easier access to Western medicine and a legal way to pay tuition for Iranian students abroad.
Although all US sanctions legislation has what is known as a “humanitarian exemption,” US blacklisting of most Iranian banks has in practice made it almost impossible for Iranians to find a legal way to move money for any purpose. The result has been shortages of life-saving drugs for cancer and other dire diseases while ordinary Iranians have had to resort to shady methods such as hawalas to move funds to and from Iran.
Iranian officials have repeatedly raised this issue with Americans and the subject merited three bullet points in the four-page “joint plan of action” signed in Geneva this weekend. According to the document, the United States and the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) promised to “establish a financial channel to facilitate humanitarian trade for Iran’s domestic needs using Iranian oil revenues held abroad.” The channel is also intended to allow Iran to pay its debts to international institutions and to enable Iranians to make “direct tuition payments to universities and colleges for Iranian students studying abroad.”
At least in the short term, the US Treasury Department is not allowing any non-sanctioned Iranian banks to open an account in any US bank for humanitarian trade, although sources indicated to Al-Monitor that this is possible if Iran and the P5+1 conclude a comprehensive nuclear agreement as envisioned by the Geneva accords.
