MEXICO CITY, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- The United States should be barred by international law from imposing unilateral coercive measures or sanctions on countries and governments it disagrees with, including in Latin America, according to a recent research paper cited by Latin American TV network TeleSUR.

In an article earlier this week, TeleSUR spotlighted the paper published in December 2022 in Sorbonne Student Law Review, titled "The U.S. Unilateral Coercive Measures Imposed in Latin America," which calls for a global legal framework to protect against these practices.

"The international community should continue paving the way to legally qualify these practices as 'Internationally Wrongful Acts' and adopt a set of guidelines, a declaration, or a legally binding instrument to regulate the use of unilateral coercive measures in international relations," said the paper written by Andrea Valentina Dias Bolivar, a Ph.D. student at the University of Geneva.

The study condemns the consequences of U.S.-imposed unilateral coercive measures on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, noting that while there is still a long way to adopt a universal definition of what constitutes unlawful coercion, these strategies have undoubtedly undermined development and violated human rights to punish countries that don't align with Washington.

U.S. sanctions against Cuba, for example, have cost the economy of the small Caribbean island up to 933 billion U.S. dollars in losses over the decades, the study said.

World opinion favors Cuba in its dispute with Washington over the latter's sanctions regime, the study added, noting that "since 1992, Cuba has gained nearly universal consensus to reject the U.S. blockade by presenting several resolutions to the United Nations General Assembly on the matter."

With more leftist governments in power regionally, Latin American countries are likely to reach a consensus on "the illegality" of unilateral coercive measures soon, according to the study. Enditem

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