Countries Should Use Thematic Sanctions Regimes, Improve Delisting, NGO Says
The U.S., the U.K. and the EU have seen a recent uptick in sanctioning people involved in organized crime, especially the U.S., which has “far and away sanctioned the greatest number of criminal actors,” the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said in a new report this month. But the nongovernmental organization said countries tend to impose these measures as part of a country-focused sanctions regime, which is a mistake because of the “highly fluid nature of modern illicit markets.” Focusing on traffickers and smugglers in one country, for instance, has a “displacement effect” and drives those actors to instead continue their illegal operations in “areas where they may fall outside the parameters of a sanctions regime.”
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Countries should instead impose those sanctions through “thematic regimes,” such as those that target corruption, cybercrime, human rights violations or terrorism, regardless of jurisdiction. This can “offer a means of more realistically responding to modern organized crime,” the report said, although “there are only a limited number of thematic regimes use by jurisdictions outside of the U.S.”
The report also suggested a “heightened focus on exiting sanctions,” adding that sanctioned people who petition to be delisted due to sanctions errors or changes in behavior often experience “a highly complex and frequently unsuccessful affair.” The organization said this “weakens delisting as an incentive to actors to change the activities or conduct which led to their designation in the first place.”
Although governments differ in how they approach the delisting process, “none really do it well,” the report said, adding that the issues “seem to be rooted, in part, in resource constraints and political disinterest.” U.S. sanctions lawyers say delisting requests often aren’t prioritized, sometimes take years to adjudicate and lack transparency (see 2305010023).
The report said the U.S. “has a relatively well-developed and well-understood structure for de-listing” compared with the EU, “although its decision-making is slow and opaque. The limited and often complicated protections for designees complicate efforts to use the tools to address organized crime, affect public perceptions and, noted one former U.S. official, ‘harm the credibility of the sanctions programme.’”
The report also noted that countries face challenges gathering evidence about transnational criminal actors to justify their sanctions. “Such evidentiary challenges are likely only to mount, given the proliferation of regimes across jurisdictions that are focused on corruption and other normative violations,” the organization said.
It also pointed to the challenges caused by governments’ various sanctions decision-making processes. The U.S. has “a number of different departments and agencies” with sanctions oversight, and they all sit within one branch of one government. But the U.N. relies on consensus among a host of member states, and the EU’s process involves “substantial political bargaining during negotiations” among the various EU member countries.
The organization also said that as sanctions become more prevalent, there is “frequent confusion about the nature of sanctions in public statements that frequently conflate them with law enforcement and present them as linked to international law.” This has “fuelled public perceptions that sanctions are criminal justice tools.”