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Global Governance Centre
12 October 2022

Policy Highlight: New Report on UN Security Council Targeted Sanctions and Due Process

Professor Thomas Biersteker and Larissa van den Herik release workshop summary report on how to strengthen fair process in UN sanctions regimes that target individuals.

Since the 1990s, the ever-growing turn to targeted sanctions and the introduction of individual targeting as instruments for enforcing peace and security has raised a number of fair process legal issues. As part of an ongoing effort to ensure due process human rights and protect United Nations (UN) sanctions regimes from legal challenges, the Greentree Foundation in New York hosted a high-level workshop in April 2022 bringing together UN Security Council members, other UN Member States, senior UN officials, members of UN panels of experts, and leading international scholars. Co-organized by the governments of Switzerland, Ireland, and Norway, the workshop sought to identify due process issues that arise when individuals and entities become the subjects of UN sanctions and identify potential remedies. Engaging with a series of policy recommendations made in a 2021 Report Enhancing Due Process in UN Security Council Targeted Sanctions Regimes, conference participants discussed the possibility of creating context-sensitive review mechanisms and how such mechanisms could be applied in situations of armed conflict. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants seemed to align pragmatically on the potential of expanding the mandate of the Office of the Ombudsperson, which presently only receives and reviews delisting petitions relative to the Security Council’s ISIL and Al-Qaida Sanctions List.

Offering an overview of the abovementioned discussions, GGC Affiliate Professor Thomas Biersteker and Professor Larissa van den Herik (Leiden University) have released a workshop summary report, entitled Enhancing Due Process in UN Security Council Targeted Sanctions Regimes: Ongoing Challenges, New Approaches. As the workshop was held under the Chatham House Rule, the report does not identify the positon-taking any of the participants, but provides an overview of the discussions that took place and ways of moving forward.

A testimony to the proximity of its faculty and research community to international policy-making processes, both as neutral observers and as external experts, this report is just one example of the important work being done at the Geneva Graduate Institute on sanctions. To have a more overarching view of the multiple initiatives, research projects, and publications touching on the design and implementation from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives, check out the Institute’s newly-launched Sanction and Sustainable Peace Hub.

Read the full report here