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quickly swept through various social networks and Internet websites in
2012.
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In fact, Iranian citizens living all across the world were of the opinion
that medicinal sanctions against Iran constituted a blatant case of human
rights violation and used various means to slam the United Nations and
other international human rights organizations for their silence in the face
of this problem. A review of the bitter experience that Iranians have had in
this regard can adequately alert human rights advocates and remind them
of their duty to stand up against repetition of this bitter experience for any
other nation. In this way, as long as unilateral Western sanctions against Iran
over the country’s nuclear issue were in place, all the Iranian people were
deprived of their right to “have access to essential medicines.” This human
rights catastrophe has been consistently ignored by major political actors.
In this paper, an effort will be made to discuss inhumane effects of these
sanctions on both patients and the process of production and distribution
of medicines in Iran, so that, if similar sanctions were imposed on other
countries, such human rights catastrophes could be prevented in early stages.
Looking for a simple wound dressing
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Adel, who is a 25-year-old patient with Epidermolysis Bullosa
(EB), says, “During the sanctions period, we had problems
even for buying a Mepilex wound dressing, because it was
imported into the country through several intermediaries and
the dressing, which we had to use on a daily basis, could not
be found in the country. “As a result, we had to pay 1.5 million
Rials (about 38 dollars) for a single piece of dressing, which only
covers a small part of our body.”