Welcome to Pushback. I'm Erin Nate. Joining me is Elena Dohan. She is the UN special rapporteur on unilateral coercive

measures and human rights. Unilateral course of measures, also known as sanctions.

Elena Dohan, thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure for me.

You have just returned from a trip to Syria, and upon your return, you issued a call

for an end to sanctions that have been imposed on Syria, which you say have been suffocating

the Syrian people. Talk to us about what you saw on your

visit and what the scope of these U.S.-led sanctions on Syria are and how they impact people's

lives inside Syria. Indeed, that's a very broad question.

So first of all, it's necessary to mention that that's not only the US,

but a number of other actors which are imposing sanctions on Syria.

We are speaking about sanctions of the European Union.

We are speaking about sanctions of Canada, well as another, of other countries.

So at the very end, Syria faces an extremely broad scope of sanctions imposed by a multiple

actors, which quite often are overlapping with each others, but sometimes they are imposed by a single

country only.

And at the very end, we're speaking about individual sanctions, so targeted sanctions,

but which are imposed ex-officer over every higher state official.

So every minister becomes designated as soon as he or she is appointed as a minister.

That basically means that any third actor is scared to deal with anything having to do with the

public sector of Syria, even if we speak about the cultural field.

There are sanctions which are imposed on the trade of oil, as well as many other areas, including, for example, the aircrafts and so forth.

And there is a prohibition to do any financial transactions with Syria or Syrians.

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