The ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ legal nature of non-UN sanctions : the case of the US sanctions against Russia

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Creating and contesting hierarchy: the punitive effect of sanctions in a horizontal system

Sanctions are presented as a form of international punishment that not only stigmatises the target, but creates a hierarchy between those who impose punishment and those punished. Such practices go against the principle of sovereign equality and contradict the horizontal structure of the international system. Drawing on the literature on stigma management and resentment, this paper argues that when states react to sanctions, they respond not only to the imposition of stigma, but also to the inferior position in which they are placed. Targets may resent the position of authority adopted by the sanctioners. This may in turn motivate them to contest the status quo upon which sanctioners justify their authority, thereby reasserting the norms and corresponding practices they believe should be prioritized

The Proportionality of Unilateral “Targeted” Sanctions: Whose Interests Should Count?

Comprehensive sanctions were considered to be disproportionate in their collateral effects for the harm caused to the populations of sanctioned States. With the emergence of the concept of targeted sanctions, questions regarding proportionality were expected to fade away. After all, targeted sanctions were supposed to be inherently proportional precisely because they were targeted. Nevertheless, the use of selective embargoes, also known as sectoral sanctions, continues to give rise to issues of proportionality. One of the lacunas of the current system is there is no uniform proportionality standard that applies to unilateral sanctions as these measures fall with different types of legal regimes, each with their own proportionality standard. Drawing from recent State practice and the existing legal standards, the present contribution maps the respective interests that should inform proportionality discussions in distinct sanctions regimes and explores to what extent the proportionality principle can account for each of these interests