Test case for the resilience of the EU's constitutional foundations

Most recently, restrictive measures adopted against private individuals have stirred up a lot of controversy. Essentially, these measures identify natural and legal persons as terrorist suspects, freeze their assets, and impose travel bans against them. On the one hand, sanctions against individuals are considered to be more advanced than trade embargoes against states. Although they pursue the same aim of maintaining international peace and security, they do not indistinctly restrict the rights of whole populations. On the other hand, sanctions against individuals are adopted pursuant to essentially the same procedures as sanctions against states. Consequently, they are heavily criticized for disregarding well-established procedural rights. Certainly, individual sanctions are an illustrative example of how ‘global governance’ dealing with de-territorialized problems of today’s world directly impacts on the rights of individuals.