Sanctions are more sorely needed than ever as a way to hold corrupt officials or actors to account, especially in countries whose justice systems fail to do so. But long-lived concerns about their politicization and potential abuse loom large, and those doubts are now exacerbated by the current U.S. administration’s erratic sanctions decision-making, including unexplained revocations of corruption designations. Together with President Trump’s sanctions against International Criminal Court judges, including the Court’s president, and the (by now withdrawn) designation of a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, this means that the voices critical of sanctions are only likely to grow louder.
That criticism arrives at a formative moment for corruption sanctions. Over the past decade, a raft of countries have enacted corruption sanctions regimes, including the United States, UK, Australia, and Canada, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has endorsed the approach. In a recent report commissioned by the Basel Institute on Governance, “Corruption Sanctions: What Governments Need to Know,” I argue that governments that do not yet have corruption sanctions regimes should consider introducing them, and those that do are not using them to their full effect and should develop strategies to ensure credible, consistent, and transparent use. But both depend on those powers to be wielded credibly, something the past year has put into doubt.
Those doubts, however, are not an argument to abandon sanctions, especially in the anti-corruption context. Nor is the answer necessarily more due process, which, as I explain below, would blunt the very flexibility that lets these sanctions operate without the cooperation of the government concerned, and often against its active obstruction. What is imperative is that all governments – including this U.S. administration – recognize that the credibility of their sanctions is not a “nice to have.” It is integral to their effectiveness.
Sanctions and Due Process
To start with the basics, targeted sanctions are financial and travel restrictions that governments impose against specific individuals or companies. These restrictions target undesirable affiliations or activities, such as support for a dictatorial regime, membership in a terrorist group, or involvement in conduct such as corruption.
In major sanctioning jurisdictions, sanctions are imposed by governments without any judicial authorization, although their lawfulness can be reviewed by the courts retrospectively. Those targeted do not receive any prior notice of sanctions since doing so would enable them to hide their assets and undermine the effectiveness of sanctions. These features of sanctions enable governments to act with agility and an element of surprise.
The due process protections that sanctions laws afford have long been controversial. Low evidentiary standards, such as “credible evidence” under the U.S. Global Magnitsky Act, confer broad discretion on governments. Under applicable judicial review rules, such as those in the U.S. Administrative Procedure Act, claimants are normally required to demonstrate that the designation was vitiated by a severe flaw, such as arbitrariness or capriciousness, rather than merely wrong.
Despite some differences in sanctions laws, this basic legislative schema – broad governmental discretion combined with restrictive judicial review rules – characterizes all major sanctioning powers, including the UK, Canada, and Australia. EU rules are different, but they too ultimately allow the European Commission to impose sanctions with few constraints.
There are genuine trade-offs involved. The flexibility of corruption sanctions can be a major advantage, but it also harbors the risks of abuse. As I note in the report, irresponsible governments could already choose to misuse the flexibility that sanctions afford. The credibility of “Western” sanctions regimes is a product not so much of the legal frameworks that govern their imposition, but of the self-restraint and judiciousness that characterizes their use in practice. In my experience of conversations with sanctions officials and civil society groups alike, gathering the evidence required for a sanctions designation is universally viewed as a painstaking and demanding task.
The Soft Power of Sanctions
If this established practice is set aside in favor of ill-thought-through or overtly political designations, the damage caused by such irresponsible use of sanctions will be profound. To see why, consider what sanctions actually do.
The direct effects of sanctions include the freezing of the targeted person’s assets; a ban on anyone in the sanctioning country transacting with the sanctioned person; and a prohibition on their travel to the sanctioning country’s territory. As far as U.S. sanctions are concerned, a particularly potent consequence is the sanctioned person’s inability to send or receive money via U.S. banks, which effectively shuts them out of global commerce.
Those are powerful effects, but so are the many indirect, second-order consequences of sanctions. Legitimate, credible sanctions can bring about follow-on action by overseas governments, whether through sanctions of their own or traditional criminal justice measures. International businesses tend to treat sanctions as a strong indicator of financial crime risk and shun those sanctioned by Western governments even when not legally required to do so. Media scrutiny that follows sanction designations further amplifies these effects.
As sanctions designations lose credibility, this “soft power” erodes: the direct legal effects remain, but the voluntary amplification by other parties — foreign follow-on designations, bank de-risking, media scrutiny of those designated — falls away. Trust is essential to the multilateralization of sanctions, and already only a minority of Global Magnitsky sanctions are imposed in a coordinated fashion by the United States, EU, and UK. More starkly, the Dutch and EU opposition to U.S. ICC sanctions offers a glimmer of a world where close allies must work to frustrate rather than strengthen the effects of U.S. sanctions.
Anything that discredits sanctions also hands ammunition to governments, such as Russia and Iran, that have long sought to delegitimize sanctions regimes across the board. The most visible manifestation of their efforts is the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, the UN’s pejorative term for sanctions imposed outside the Security Council. Until April 2026, the mandate was held by Alena Douhan, a Belarusian law professor who consistently sided with Putin’s Russia, al-Assad’s Syria, and Maduro’s Venezuela. The circumstances of her successor’s appointment give little comfort: the Human Rights Council’s expert consultative group ranked Professor Clara Portela — one of the field’s leading sanctions scholars — first for the post, yet the Council appointed the second-ranked candidate, an entry-level academic at the American University of Beirut with no comparable sanctions track record.
Conclusion
In short, sanctions are a sui generis tool. They are flexible, versatile, constrained by only limited due process safeguards, and most effective if adopted multilaterally. The Trump administration’s measures that dilute their “soft power” thereby weaken the U.S. and its allies’ ability to tackle diverse forms of wrongdoing, including corruption.
More generally, governments should strive for clarity, consistency, and credibility in their application of sanctions. One of the report’s nine recommendations captures the point:
To enhance the consistency and credibility of their application and to mitigate due process concerns, governments should publish clear criteria for the imposition of corruption sanctions and the granting of corruption sanctions licences, and they should publish the rationale for any such decisions. They should also publicly explain, in appropriate level of detail, any corruption sanctions delistings.
The full set, along with a Quick Guide for practitioners, is available from the Basel Institute.
The greatest risk at present is that instances of questionable or unprincipled use of sanctions will sap governments’ willingness to consider the introduction of new sanctions regimes, including corruption sanctions, internationally. This would be a mistake, but it also behooves those governments that already have corruption sanctions regimes in place to use them responsibly – the risks of not doing so are substantial.
