Last week, the Trump administration sanctioned four judges of the International Criminal Court, who were subjected to an asset freeze and a travel ban simply for doing their job. Yesterday, the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom sanctioned two extremist Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for inciting violence and other human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank. They, too, were subjected to asset freezes and travel bans. Within the span of a week, the same tool was used by different (allied?) states for very different ends – in the latter case to pursue a measure of justice, in the former to outrage any sense of justice. For many years, states and scholars have debated the legality of sanctions or coercive measures. For some, sanctions are a legitimate and legal tool of statecraft. For others, sanctions violate the rights of the target state, and/or the human rights of its population or persons who were targeted individually. When it comes to the rights of the…
Financial Sanctions
Page 1 of 2
Trump’s Coercion of America’s Allies and the Prohibition of Intervention
Next week, Donald Trump will become President of the United States. Again. Even before his assumption of the presidency, he seems to have started setting his country’s foreign policy. Among the many items on his agenda, we have witnessed all these ideas and proposals about making Canada the 51st state, seizing the Panama Canal and…
Immobilised Assets, Extraordinary Profits: The EU Council Decision on Russia’s Central Bank Reserves and Its Legal Challenges
On 28 February 2024, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that ‘it is time to start a conversation about using the windfall profits of frozen Russian assets to jointly purchase military equipment for Ukraine’. This statement comes on the heels of a decision adopted by the Council of the European Union (EU)…
Caught in a Geopolitical Crossfire: Questioning the Legality of US-Imposed Export Controls on Dutch Computer Chip Machines
For years now, the US has lobbied with the Dutch government to institute controls on the export to China of chipmaking machines produced by ASML, Europe’s most valuable tech company. In 2019, Washington effectively pushed the Netherlands to prevent the export of one of ASML’s most advanced “Extreme Ultraviolet” (EUV) lithography machines to China. And…
Revisiting Coercion
The prohibition of intervention, requiring States to refrain from coercively interfering in the internal or external affairs of other States, is widely recognized as a cardinal rule of customary international law. There is also widespread agreement about the constituent elements of the rule: (1) an interference with a State’s internal or external affairs which is (2) coercive in…
- Page 1 of 2
- Last