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Amnesty International has called today on President Obama and Congress to end the US embargo, which the global human rights organization charged interferes with the right to health enshrined in the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Amnesty's report opens with a reminder to readers that we're not just talking about some mambi-pambi program, but that according our own Government Accountability Office: "The embargo on Cuba is the most comprehensive set of US sanctuions on any country, including the other countries designated by the US government to be state sponsors of terrorism."

And perhaps because it bears repeating, Amnesty's discussion of the embargo's impact on Cubans begins with this finding from the United Nations' development team: "The negative impact of the embargo is pervasive in the social, economic and environmental dimensions of human development in Cuba, severely affecting the most vulnerable socio-economic groups of the Cuban population."

Amnesty's indictment of the embargo is well developed and deeply affecting, and demands attention from U.S. policymakers and influencers (check back here later today for a fuller discussion of the humanitarian dimension). But it was Amnesty's recommendations to President Obama, and to Congress, that really interest me.

Most prominently, Amnesty recommends that President Obama decline to renew the annual declaration (that it is in the US interest to continue certain sanctions against Cuba) - which is less than two weeks away - that is the legal foundation for the presidential authority to continue many longstanding Cuba sanctions.

I'm sure I just lost a whole bunch of you right there . . . but if you're still with me, keep in mind that everything the President - any US President - does must have its foundation in some law giving the office broad or specific authority to act. Back when President Kennedy first declared the embargo, he had broad authority to declare national emergencies and leave them there - often far past their use and beyond the reach of congressional oversight.

So, in 1977, Congressional scaled back that authority for future national emergencies; but it grandfathered in existing authorities (such as the one for the Cuba embargo) as long as the President determined, on a yearly basis, that continued exercise of that authority was still in the national interest. President George W. Bush last signed this determination on September 12, 2008. (Note that Cuba is the only country against which sanctions derived from the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act are still in place.)

And so for close to 3 decades now, the embargo remains in place because of a yearly presidential determination that it ought to. Amnesty's report, coming just ahead of this annual determination (and the first one for President Obama), helps shine a light on President Obama's biggest Cuba decision moment yet: whether to own the embargo he inherited and, not five years ago, said he thought should be ended.

Complicating the picture, however, is that the 1996 Helms-Burton Act made what had largely been a presidentially-declared embargo now law: "The economic embargo of Cuba, as in effect on March 1, 1996, including all [regulatory] restrictions under Part 515 of Title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, shall be in effect" until the President determines that Cuba is undergoing a democratic transition.

So, what happens if President Obama takes Amnesty's advice (it'd be so easy to just not sign that piece of paper, wouldn't it)? How, then, can the Helms-Burton Act require the continuation of sanctions that are no longer the President's right to enforce?

Amnesty reasons that the President's refusal to renew his embargo authority would require Congress to lift the various economic sanctions contained in the Helms-Burton Act, and the human rights group calls on Congress to do so. It's an interesting approach to dismantling an embargo set forth in law. You could maybe say that Amnesty proposed putting the cart (the President) before the horse (Congress), but in this case, it's a pretty clever idea.

President Obama has a choice to make: Refuse to sign that piece of paper and you set off a legal limbo that would lead to the dismantling of the embargo. Sign it - and contradict what we all know to be your real opinion of the 50-year embargo. Sign that piece of paper and it becomes your embargo, Mr. President.

--Anya Landau French, author of Options for Engagement, A Resource Guide to Reforming U.S. Policy Toward Cuba