The Right to Science Under Siege: Sanctions Over-Compliance and Digital Exclusion in Iran

[Zahra Jafarbeklou is a researcher in international law based in Iran and an LL.M. candidate at the Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University]

Introduction: The Paradox of “Permitted” Isolation

The late 2025 snapback mechanism triggered the digital siege stifling Iran’s academic community. On paper, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has issued General License D-2 (GL D-2) to facilitate Iranian access to the internet, educational platforms, and communication tools. The stated aim is to support the free flow of information and to ensure that sanctions do not inadvertently target the civilian population’s access to knowledge.

For Tehran-based scholars, however, the practical reality starkly contradicts these authorizations. This systemic erasure from the global scientific ecosystem stems primarily from corporate over-compliance, as tech firms impose blanket jurisdictional blocks to bypass regulatory complexities.

This post argues that current digital exclusion has escalated from simple lack of access into identity-based segregation. By blocking critical infrastructure such as development infrastructure and AI-driven research assistants like Gemini, tech giants are effectively undermining the Right to Science under Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) for millions of users, rendering international scientific cooperation impossible.

To grasp the severity of this exclusion, one must recognize the double siege facing Iranian scholars. Against the backdrop of escalating regional conflict, the digital lifeline is thinner than ever.   Domestically, following an initial blackout on January 8, 2026, ongoing hostilities have triggered a sustained connectivity blackout now exceeding 70 days and counting, effectively halting scientific communication.

Moreover, over-compliance severely threatens everyday academic survival. Simple acts, such as pulling a standard code library from GitHub, querying AI assistants like Gemini for literature reviews, or accessing container images on Docker for class projects, are blocked not by domestic firewalls, but by foreign servers detecting an Iranian IP. This environment creates a forced academic isolation where visa restrictions and digital blockades lead to structural disqualification based purely on geography. Beyond the immediate loss of tools, this exclusion forces researchers into a precarious trade-off between academic progress and digital security. To bypass these blanket blocks, students are often compelled to use unverified third-party DNS services or anti-sanction tools that circumvent corporate firewalls but expose their data, research, and intellectual property to severe cyber threats and surveillance. This introduces a structural insecurity that their international peers never encounter. 

Why do cloud-based tools and container services remain inaccessible despite GL D-2? As Stępień et al. note, severe deterrence effects and regulatory ambiguity drive aggressive corporate de-risking. Lacking clear safe harbors, firms systematically default to zero-tolerance screening and the most restrictive legal interpretations.

Mechanisms of Exclusion: Why “General Licenses” Fail?

To understand why OFAC’s legal permissions are ignored in practice, one must dissect the economic logic governing corporate legal departments. Research indicates that over-compliance arises when firms face high legal and financial uncertainty. Two primary catalysts drive this behavior:

First, severe U.S. enforcement and reputational risks compel firms to abandon even permissible trade, a deterrent effect demonstrated by Early & Peterson. Second, overlapping sanctions regimes and regulatory ambiguity create profound legal uncertainty. Consequently, multinational corporations systematically default to total market exit, as the catastrophic risks of inadvertent violations far outweigh the marginal benefits of serving Iranian academia.

In corporate calculus, the cost of distinguishing a civilian Iranian student from a sanctioned entity far outweighs the near-zero revenue from the Iranian market. Consequently, firms often resort to blanket bans. This practice of over-compliance creates a systemic failure identified by UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan. In her report on the visit to Iran (A/HRC/51/33/Add.1), she argues that private actors, driven by fear of secondary sanctions, act as unaccountable enforcement agents, expanding sanctions beyond their legal limits. Legally, this violates the requirement of Human Rights Due Diligence under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Tech companies are obligated to assess the actual impact of their compliance measures on civilians; by employing indiscriminate IP blocking as a default, they prioritize corporate risk-avoidance over their responsibilities to protect access to knowledge and the Right to Science.

 This de-risking strategy renders GL D-2’s exemptions effectively illusory, hindering the progressive realization of the Right to Science under Article 15(1) of the ICESCR, the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress. In practice, it denies Iranian academics equitable access to permitted digital tools, creating a geographically imposed barrier to knowledge production that undermines international scientific cooperation.

The Architecture of Exclusion: A Digital Iron Curtain

Digital exclusion in Iran is often misunderstood as a simple connectivity issue. In reality, it is a multi-layered legal and technical siege. Based on technical stress tests conducted from Tehran in December 2025, observations derived from repeated access attempts using standard residential ISPs, this exclusion manifests in three distinct layers, forming a Digital Iron Curtain.

This blockade targets the entire lifecycle of knowledge production:

1. The Hard Block (Infrastructure Denial)

The obstruction begins at the development layer. Platforms like Google Cloud and GitLab, essential for modern coding, reproducibility and data analysis enforce strict geo-blocking. A similar embargo applies to professional scientific software such as Autodesk, where even Educational Licenses for simulation and analysis are blocked despite being intended for research and teaching. This exclusion is not merely a technical byproduct of IP-filtering but is fundamentally hard-coded into the legal architecture of software licensing. Under Section 17.6 (Export) of its General Terms, Autodesk prohibits access from U.S. sanctioned locations, a designation that, per the legally binding English authority (Section 17.3), specifically encompasses Iran. Crucially, the company defines these offerings in Section 11.1 as professional tools designed to assist in analysis, simulation, and testing. By denying access to such specialized infrastructure, these sanctions transcend commercial boundaries and function as a direct embargo on scientific inquiry, stifling the essential tools required for modern research and global academic participation. Users attempting to access these services from Iranian IP addresses encounter 403 Forbidden errors or TCP connection drops. This effectively deprives Iranian students of industry-standard tools, forcing them to rely on outdated offline alternatives or anti-sanction DNS services that compromise security. Analytically, this denial constitutes a breach of scientific methodology. Modern science relies on reproducibility, the ability to run the same code on the same data. By enforcing strict IP-based geo-blocking on platforms such as these environments, sanctions effectively segregate Iranian students from the global standard of reproducibility. This directly contravenes the prohibition of discrimination under Article 2 of the ICESCR, as it denies access to essential infrastructure based solely on national origin rather than scientific merit.

Furthermore, beyond breaching scientific methodology, this infrastructure denial violates the Right to Development. In the AI era, access to cloud computing and professional scientific software is not a luxury but a prerequisite for meaningful participation in the global knowledge economy. By cutting off these essential arteries, sanctions over-compliance effectively demotes Iranian academia to a pre-modern status, deliberately widening the technological gap between the Global North and South.

2. The Soft Block (Identity-Based Removal)

A more insidious trend observed on platforms like OpenAI or certain Google services. While these sites may initially load (creating an illusion of access), they prevent user registration by excluding Iran from phone number verification lists. Here, the user is excluded not merely due to momentary location, but due to their identity. Even with a VPN, an Iranian researcher cannot create an account, as their digital identity is flagged as unsupported. This identity-based segregation extends beyond temporary blocks, preventing Iranian researchers from establishing persistent digital identities on global platforms and engaging in ongoing scholarly exchanges, a direct impediment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge as emphasized in General Comment No. 25.

3. The Financial Firewall (Transactional Exclusion)

The third and perhaps most debilitating layer is the inability to participate in the financial ecosystem of science. Even if a platform is technically accessible, the severance of the Iranian banking sector from SWIFT means researchers cannot pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Open Access journals, membership fees for scientific societies, or registration fees for international conferences. This financial wall effectively silences Iranian scientific output in high-impact venues, regardless of the research quality. By erecting a transactional barrier inaccessible to sanctioned populations, this layer contravenes the freedom indispensable for scientific research guaranteed by Article 15(3) of the ICESCR, silencing Iranian contributions in high-impact venues solely due to financial isolation rather than scientific merit.

Prominent platforms like Kaggle or  major student competitions like the Microsoft Imagine Cup often confront students not with a difficult problem, but with a generic ‘403 Forbidden error’, leaving them barred from participation without explanation.

The Human Cost: The Right to Science Under Siege

This technical blockade translates into widespread professional paralysis. For Iranian students, the Right to Science is not an abstract concept, but a daily struggle for digital survival.

Legally, this situation represents a violation of international norms. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in General Comment No. 25 (2020), explicitly affirmed that the Right to Science includes access to the applications of scientific progress, including information and communication technologies. The Committee emphasized that states have an obligation to prevent third parties, including corporations, from infringing on this right. Yet, the current sanctions regime does exactly the opposite. This reality directly engages with Douhan’s findings. In her report, she explicitly documents these impediments, emphasizing that States must ensure their sanctions do not infringe upon the rights of populations abroad. 

Unfortunately, by maintaining a vague regulatory environment that incentivizes de-risking, the sanctioning State fails its Duty to Protect against third-party human rights abuses, a core tenet of Principle 1 of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Furthermore, corporations fail their corresponding responsibility to respect human rights under Principle 11 of the UNGPs. As noted by the Rapporteur, states must ensure that corporate compliance mechanisms do not exacerbate humanitarian impacts, a duty currently neglected under the guise of security protocols. Such over-compliance effectively acts as a retrogressive measure, contradicting the progressive realization of rights mandated by the ICESCR.

Much like past sanctions restricted medical access despite “humanitarian exemptions”, current corporate over-compliance systematically deprives the academic community of essential analytical tools and data repositories. This over-compliance by foreign tech companies acts as a devastating blockade, severing the vital artery to global knowledge.

Conclusion: Moving from “License” to “Access”

The existence of General License D-2 proves that the U.S. government, at least in theory, intends to preserve the free flow of information. However, intent without enforcement is meaningless. The current situation where a legal exemption is nullified by corporate fear represents a structural failure of the sanctions regime.

To breach this Digital Iron Curtain, vague assurances are insufficient. Two concrete operational steps are necessary:

First, Comfort Letters: OFAC must go beyond general licenses and issue specific comfort letters to major tech firms, explicitly guaranteeing that providing free development and scientific tools to Iranian users will not trigger enforcement actions. These letters must address the specific concerns of tech compliance officers regarding dual-use technologies.

Second, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Tech companies must align their practices with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This alignment ensures that compliance measures do not disproportionately infringe upon civilian access to essential scientific infrastructure.

Until the gap between law and enforcement is bridged, the free flow of information will remain a hollow slogan.