“EU has supported the #US #Saudi #UAE #Israel Regime Change effort in #Syria for 10 years,” Mick Wallace, an independent Irish member of the European Parliament tweeted on Saturday.
He added, “And now #EU pretends that it cares about the 12 million Syrians who are food insecure? What in God's name did they think their illegal #sanctions were going to do to the Syrian people...?”
The EU has imposed several rounds of sanctions against the Arab country, the first of which came in May 2011. They include travel bans, asset freezes, and measures targeting operations like oil imports, certain investments as well as technology transfer.
The European body has since October 2020 imposed sanctions against more than a dozen Syrian ministers. The restrictive measures ban the ministers from traveling to Europe and will see their assets frozen.
The US, for its part, has imposed rounds of crippling sanctions against Syria. Parts of the sanctions have been imposed under the so-called Caesar Act, an American piece of legislation that alleges to support the Syrian people by protecting them against the Syrian administration’s way of governance.
Damascus has said several times that the US and its allies have defied calls from the UN chief and the UN human rights council for the lifting of such restrictive measures, particularly at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
MR