EU global human rights sanctions regime: is the genie out of the bottle?

On 7 December 2020, the EU Foreign Affairs Council adopted an ‘EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime’ (EU HRSR). The EU HRSR is an example of a transnational response to a fundamental security-related challenge. Both its adoption and its specific institutional set-up are a continuation of the move towards stronger supranational practices in the area of sanctions. Further supranationalising the EU’s sanctioning practices, as one of its most developed and most powerful tools to response to security threats, is likely to increase the uniformity, flexibility, and arguably also the impartiality of the sanctions. At the same time, the adoption process also demonstrated that national governments set limits to further supranationalisation. While in particular the Dutch parliament was a driving force behind the adoption of the EU HRSR, both national parliaments and the European Parliament are likely to struggle to have significant influence over the sanctioning process. Yet, much depends on the actual sanctioning practices and the legal framing of the EU HRSR’s objectives, designation criteria and evidentiary threshold may in practice raise legitimacy problems.