This article was initially drafted for a Perry World House conference on “The Intersection of Sanctions and Corruption,” which was made possible in part by a generous grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The views expressed are solely the author’s and do not reflect those of Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania, or Carnegie Corporation of New York.
When Congress established new tools to attack global corruption and protect human rights, it intended to hold responsible corrupt officials and human-rights abusers who often operate beyond the reach of the judicial system. These legislative authorities are used by the executive branch to implement restrictive measures ranging from visa bans to full economic and trade sanctions. The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act – named after Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian tax lawyer who died in pretrial detention after exposing a massive state fraud – created the most expansive extraterritorial financial sanctions program that the United States had ever assembled. While authority under Section 7031(c) of the State Department’s annual appropriations legislation focuses on barring entry to the United States, it nonetheless causes enough reputational damage to sever banking relationships, collapse business partnerships, and destroy political careers.
This exceptional power, however, has made U.S. human-rights and anticorruption efforts a prime target for exploitation. Legal standards for designations are deliberately broad, evidentiary records are usually hidden from public scrutiny, and designated individuals are afforded minimal procedural protections. Consequently, the architecture of both Global Magnitsky sanctions (GLOMAG) and Section 7031(c) has proven remarkably susceptible to manipulation by the very actors these laws were designed to confront: oligarchs, corrupt officials, and authoritarian governments who work to co-opt U.S. moral authority to neutralize business rivals, silence political opponents, and settle personal scores.
Structural Vulnerabilities
The Global Magnitsky Act authorizes the President to designate any foreign person for whom the executive branch possesses “credible information” indicating corruption or human-rights abuse. Section 7031(c) similarly directs the Secretary of State to deny visas to officials “credibly alleged” to have been involved in significant corruption or a gross violation of human rights. Neither statute defines “credible,” nor do they establish minimum evidentiary thresholds or safeguards.
Challenges to designations for these restrictive measures are governed by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), under which courts review executive action with an “arbitrary and capricious” standard. This effectively asks only whether the government had a “rational basis to believe” its conclusion. As the D.C. Circuit has repeatedly confirmed in litigation involving the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which administers most sanctions programs including GLOMAG, the government is not required to disclose classified or law-enforcement-sensitive evidence even to the designated party, let alone to the public. The result is a system in which designations may rely on a small number of foreign-government reports, nongovernmental organization (NGO) filings, or diplomatic cables that have never been tested against contrary evidence.
The Global Magnitsky Act explicitly contemplates that the executive branch may act on “credible information obtained by other countries.” While this was intended to pragmatically recognize that foreign partners often have superior intelligence about local businesses and officials, it creates an opening for bad actors to feed disinformation into the U.S. designation process. Rumors and accusations can be packaged in formats that agencies recognize as credible – foreign court filings, law-enforcement records, parliamentary testimony, NGO reports – and routed through formal channels where they acquire a false veneer of legitimacy before reaching Washington. Moreover, Executive Order 13818, which implements the Global Magnitsky Act, diverges from it in significant ways – substituting “serious human rights abuse” for the Act’s defined criteria of “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights,” broadening the targeting reach, adding material-assistance prongs, and reverting to standard OFAC evidentiary and removal requirements.
Because designated individuals are almost always non-U.S. persons, they cannot claim constitutional due process protections. OFAC’s administrative delisting process requires the petitioner to submit arguments or evidence establishing that “an insufficient basis exists for the [designation]” or that “the circumstances resulting in the [designation] no longer apply” — standards that can be impossible to meet when petitioners have no right to see the evidence against them. They can only request a so-called “courtesy document,” consisting of a short index of the unclassified information underlying their designation, which is always heavily redacted. The State Department’s 7031(c) process is even more opaque and has no formal reconsideration mechanism. Unlike the European Union’s asset-freeze regime, which its Court of Justice has repeatedly subjected to due process review, GLOMAG designations face almost no domestic judicial check on their factual basis.
When OFAC publishes additions to its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List, the releases include names, aliases, and broad descriptions of alleged conduct, but never disclose the actual evidentiary basis. Section 7031(c) visa ineligibility determinations are sometimes not published at all or disclosed only to the individual’s own government. This overbroad secrecy, which is justified as a national security concern, largely eliminates the possibility of independent legal, journalistic, or academic scrutiny. A bad actor who successfully injects a false narrative into the agency targeting process can therefore be confident that the factual predicate for any resulting designation will probably never be challenged.
Documented Patterns of Manipulation
The Western Balkans and former Soviet Bloc vividly illustrate this weaponization dynamic, with competing oligarchic networks that maintain sophisticated intelligence operations in Washington. Investigative reporting by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) has documented cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina where rival political factions retained U.S. lobbying firms and NGO intermediaries specifically to compile and transmit adverse dossiers about their political opponents to the State Department and OFAC. Often, the competing factions were indistinguishable on anticorruption or human-rights grounds, and both sides had documented records of graft. All that separated them was relative success in prompting U.S. action against their opponents. The resulting designations isolated the targeted officials while their no less corrupt rivals continued to operate with impunity.
The U.S. government designated several officials affiliated with one political bloc in Bosnia and Herzegovina largely on information provided by rival party networks. Regional investigative media outlets Detektor and Istraga published analyses illustrating the political influences around U.S. sanctions actions and suggesting that primary sources of accusations made to the U.S. government were themselves subjects of domestic criminal investigations. Investigative reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) uncovered how a businessman in Uzbekistan lobbied a member of Congress to inquire about a rival cement company’s alleged Russia links in contravention of U.S. sanctions, prompting a formal request to the Treasury Department. Similar dynamics have also been reported in North Macedonia, where, from 2021 to 2023, there was a torrent of lobbying activity by business rivals seeking Section 7031(c) determinations and OFAC designations against their opponents in the judiciary and law enforcement.
The Los Angeles Times and the investigative platform Plaza Pública in Guatemala have reported extensively on how visa ban designations on the State Department’s “Engel List” in Central America – imposed under the now-expired Section 353 of the Northern Triangle Enhanced Engagement Act – became entangled in local factional politics. Certain political networks and other interests in Guatemala hired lobbyists or cultivated relationships with U.S. NGOs to direct visa ban designations of judicial officials, while characterizing their efforts to do so as anticorruption activism. Dozens of prosecutors, judges, and businesspeople in Guatemala were added to the Engel List while mutual, retaliatory prosecutions and litigation were pending before domestic courts. NGOs and exiled former officials have publicly advocated for U.S. designations, while the targeted individuals argue they are being sanctioned based solely on unverified court filings and accusations by the same people they are fighting in Guatemalan civil and criminal courts.
Russian state media and government-affiliated think tanks have invested heavily in generating credible-looking adverse information about Ukrainian, Georgian, and Baltic officials and businesses, foisting it on journalists, human-rights organizations, and ultimately the U.S. government. The Prague-based European Values Center for Security Policy has documented Russian influence operations specifically designed to insert disinformation into Western human-rights reporting channels, which can feed directly into the Section 7031(c) and GLOMAG designation processes. China has also shown awareness of the evidentiary requirements of GLOMAG designations and begun taking actions to counter U.S. sanctions. There is strong circumstantial evidence that Chinese actors have attempted to influence NGO reporting that supports sanctions targeting efforts. Chinese intelligence has reportedly cultivated sources inside diaspora human rights organizations seeking to discredit witnesses and testimony underlying designation actions.
Consequences of Exploitation
The damage caused by the weaponization of these human rights and anticorruption designations falls into several overlapping categories. At an individual level, designated persons can suffer immediate and severe collateral consequences – including lost business relationships, frozen finances and severed banking access, and severe reputational harm – without any impartial assessment of whether the underlying allegations are in fact accurate. In contexts where designations are politically motivated, these consequences function as a form of political repression, instead of the accountability demanded by the statutory authorities.
At a systemic level, the credibility of the GLOMAG and Section 7031(c) frameworks are themselves eroded. When independent analysts and journalists document that designation lists include individuals targeted through manipulation rather than genuine wrongdoing, it becomes far easier for adversarial governments to dismiss legitimate designations as politically motivated – a narrative that Russia, China, and others have actively promoted. The value of Section 7031(c) and GLOMAG designations in driving behavior change degrades every time the process is demonstrably exploited.
This weaponization also has a chilling effect on legitimate accountability. Genuine anticorruption and human-rights advocates, investigators, and whistleblowers must operate with the knowledge that their adversaries can invert the very tools designed to protect them. Knowing that rivals might trigger U.S. sanctions imposition as a retaliatory measure creates a powerful disincentive to pursue legitimate advocacy or investigations.
Improving the Framework
The most direct corrective measure to prevent co-optation of the designation process would be legislative or administrative articulation of what “credible information” actually requires. At a minimum, the standard should mandate corroboration from independent sources, prevent uninvestigated reliance on information provided by parties with a direct financial or political interest in a proposed designation, and require assessment of the accuracy of all sources. The APA’s “rational basis” standard is insufficient protection in a designation context given the magnitude of the consequences involved. Instead, a “preponderance of independently corroborated evidence” standard would better reflect the significance of designation actions and U.S. due process values.
While classified or law-enforcement-sensitive sources should not be revealed, unclassified evidentiary summaries, similar to those routinely produced in financial-intelligence contexts, ought to be published or otherwise available at the time of a designation. The European Union’s General Court has held that designated parties in asset-freeze proceedings must receive sufficient information to understand the basis of their designation and mount a meaningful challenge. The United States should administratively or legislatively adopt an analogous standard, providing both designated individuals and independent observers with a factual predicate to review, evaluate, and challenge as necessary.
Establishing an independent review panel – composed of non-political interagency civil servants with security clearances – to assess the evidentiary bases for both proposed designations and delistings, before they become effective would substantially reduce the risk of politically motivated manipulation. The panel would review only for factual sufficiency and would have no role in policy judgments. Further, under current delisting processes, the burden is entirely on the designated person to disprove allegations they cannot fully see. A reformed standard should require the government to affirmatively demonstrate that the basis for designation remains valid – based on a “preponderance of independently corroborated evidence standard,” and in light of all available information including as submitted by the petitioner. Finally, a clear timeline for review would prevent indefinite pendency of designations based on evidence that no longer holds up.
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GLOMAG and Section 7031(c) remain among the most frequently deployed instruments of U.S. human-rights and anticorruption policy. Their power derives from the severity of their consequences – and that severity makes them attractive to those who would weaponize them. The structural vulnerabilities of these frameworks reflect deliberate determinations to preserve executive flexibility to combat corruption and protect human rights. But flexibility without accountability in the use of these restrictive measures enables other forms of injustice.
The documented patterns of manipulation by business and political rivals – from Sarajevo to Guatemala City, and from Russian influence operations to NGO and professional lobbying efforts in Washington – demand a serious policy response. Raising evidentiary standards, requiring public disclosure of factual predicates, establishing independent review, and creating enforceable delisting timelines would not weaken these tools. It would strengthen them by ensuring that human-rights and anticorruption designations remain a credible instrument of U.S. policy rather than a commodity to be weaponized for individual gain.
