EU Sanctions: Law and Policy Issues Concerning Restrictive Measures

The famous “Kadi” cases have generated a wealth of articles dealing with the legal problems involved in EU implementation of UN Security Council sanctions. Less attention has been devoted to the numerous legal problems involved in the EU’s own “autonomous” sanctions system. The subject is nevertheless topical since there is a growing use of sanctions and the legal basis for sanctions has been changed with the Lisbon treaty.

EU sanctions are used both against regimes and suspected terrorist financing. But these sanctions have developed “organically”, without sufficient thought being given to certain basic issues (inter alia concerning procedural fairness). This has resulted in considerable litigation before the Court of Justice (CJEU). The new legal basis and the recent judgments from the CJEU have solved some difficulties, but “taking sanctions seriously” means new problems for national implementation, spanning over a variety of areas: criminal law, constitutional law, international law and European law.

The essays in this book, written by distinguished scholars in their respective fields, deal with some of these issues. How should we go about measuring the impact(s) of targeted sanctions? How coherent are these “administrative” measures of blacklisting with other existing and proposed EU measures in justice and home affairs promoting the criminal law model for dealing with the problem of terrorism (investigation, trial, conviction, punishment/confiscation of assets)? How can the problems caused for fair trial by the use of intelligence material be solved? If we can (or must) continue to have sanctions in the area of terrorist financing, can they be made compatible with fundamental principles of national criminal law and criminal policy? How does a system of “composite” decision-making (when the measure is partly national and partly at the EU level) avoid the risk that gaps arise in systems of legal protection? What is the spillover effect of “overbroad” quasi-criminal legislation directed at organizations, in the constitutional/human rights of freedom of expression and association? How do EU sanctions fit into, and compare to national systems for the proscription of terrorist organizations? Should the same legal safeguards be applicable both for “regime” sanctions and anti-terrorist sanctions?