In this seminar, EUI Law researcher Ciprian Grumaz, EUI visiting student Yuliya Miadzvetskaya, and Celia Challet, senior academic assistant at College of Europe and PhD researcher at Gent University, will discuss two papers concerning the policy design and the procedure for adopting restrictive measures or sanctions by the EU, using Ukraine and Belarus as case studies. The discussions will also concentrate on the role of information transmitted by third states' authorities and decisions taken by them at domestic level.
Abstracts
Celia Challet, Dorin-Ciprian Grumaz, EU Restrictive Measures and Third Countries’ Evidence , European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 28, Issue 1, 2023
EU restrictive measures, often referred to as 'sanctions', have become an increasingly used instrument of EU autonomous foreign policy. For some restrictive measures, however, the EU cannot act alone. In order to adopt them, the Council must rely on information transmitted by third states' authorities and decisions taken by them at domestic level. This has been the case, in particular, of EU restrictive measures adopted in connection with misappropriations of state funds. The Council's use of such evidence has been somewhat controversial and has led to numerous legal debates before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). To what extent was the Council free to rely on the evidence provided by these third states' authorities? How to ensure that the fundamental rights of the targeted persons and entities were complied with in the process? Faced with these questions in its particularly abundant case law, the CJEU has progressively raised the threshold of validity for these sanctions. It has done so up to a point at which, in the authors' opinion, the sanctions can no longer reach such threshold in practice. This article addresses the evolutions and implications of the CJEU case law on a legal aspect that is of crucial importance for the EU’s sanctions practice.
Yuliya Miadzvetskaya, Celia Challet, Are EU Restrictive Measures Really Targeted, Temporary and Preventive? The Case of Belarus , Europe and the World: A Law Review, Vol. 6, Issue 1, 2023
Questions related to the EU’s ability to foster change in the behaviour of third countries through sanctions have gained salience over the past three decades. This article explores how the nature and type of EU restrictive measures, initially conceived as targeted, preventive and temporary measures, have evolved considerably since then. The EU sanctions against Belarus are used as an illustrative case study in order to shed light on the evolutions within the EU’s sanctions practice. This article first examines the erosion of the targeted character of EU sanctions against Belarus through the broadening of listing criteria and the increasing recourse to sectoral sanctions. It then questions the temporary character of EU sanctions against Belarus by highlighting their indefinite duration and cyclicity. Last but not least, it is argued that EU sanctions against Belarus have an increasingly punitive character. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications that the EU’s evolving sanctions practice can have for the current EU’s sanctions policy toward Belarus as well as for its other sanctions regimes.
Chairs: Clara Muller and Isola Clara Macchia