Despite the mounting evidence of the most serious of human rights violations being conducted by Russian forces on Ukrainian soil, the EU has chosen not to use its new Magnitsky Act to blacklist the perpetrators and their commanders.
Instead, the EU has preferred to respond to Russia’s ‘dumb’ bombs with increasingly ‘dumb’ sanctions. This Brief explains why, after decades of work to smarten up its restrictive measures, the politicisation of human rights sanctions and the high threshold of evidentiary standards make it very hard for the Council to rely on evidence gathered from transition countries where the justice sector is still vulnerable to widespread corruption and political cronyism.
Download and read: The EU’s Magnitsky Act Obsolete in the Face of Russia’s Crimes in Ukraine? (PDF)