The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), based in New York, is an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social justice through human rights. CESR currently has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council and serves as the Secretariat for the International Network on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, with hundreds of member organizations throughout the world.
Since 1991, CESR has produced a series of groundbreaking legal and humanitarian reports on the Iraq crisis. These include the first independent report on the public health crisis after the 1991 Gulf War;1 the first post-war epidemiological survey to document increased child mortality in Iraq as a result of war sanctions;2 the first medical journal article to report over half a million excess child deaths since 1991;3 the first law journal article to report on war crimes by Coalition forces;4 and the first legal report to condemn UN sanctions policy for violating the human rights of the Iraqi population.5
CESR recently launched an Emergency Campaign on Iraq to promote solutions to the Iraq crisis based on well established principles of international law. As part of this campaign, CESR has produced a set of educational resources and fact sheets, prepared legal and humanitarian reports, and conducted fact-finding in Iraq. From January 17-30, 2003, CESR organized a mission to Iraq to assess the potential humanitarian and legal consequences of war through a combination of field surveys, interviews, and access to confidential UN documents. The research team concluded that a US-led military intervention in Iraq will trigger the collapse of Iraq’s fragile public health and food distribution systems, leading to a humanitarian crisis that will far exceed the response capacity of UN and other relief agencies.6
CESR subsequently released a report on the resort to force under the UN Charter and international law international law entitled Tearing Up the Rules: The Illegality of Invading Iraq.7 Other legal and humanitarian reports will be forthcoming.
This report was prepared by Roger Normand with the assistance of Sarah Zaidi, Jacob Park, Julian Liu, and Pierre Fuller. Please contact Jacob Park at CESR for copies of the report and information about the Emergency Campaign on Iraq at jpark@cesr.org.
1 Harvard Study Team, “Special Report: The Effect of the Gulf Crisis on the Children of Iraq,” New England Journal of Medicine 325 (1991): 977-980. Lead organizers of the Harvard Study Team and International Study Team went on to establish the Center for Economic and Social Rights in 1993.
2 International Study Team, Health & Welfare in Iraq After the Gulf Crisis: An In-Depth Assessment (1991).
3 Zaidi, S. and M. Fawzi, “Health of Baghdad's Children,” The Lancet, 346 (Decebmer 2, 1995).
4 Normand, R., and C. Jochnick, “The Legitimation of Violence: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War,” 35 Harvard International Law Journal 2, at 387 (Spring 1994).
5 Center for Economic and Social Rights, Unsanctioned Suffering: A Human Rights Assessment of United Nations Sanctions Against Iraq, (May 1996).
6 Center for Economic and Social Rights, The Human Costs of War in Iraq (February 2003).
7 Center for Economic and Social Rights, Tearing up the Rules: The Illegality of Invading Iraq, (March 2003).