Perry World House

The article examines how sanctions on Syria after the February 2023 earthquake created legal ambiguities that complicated humanitarian aid efforts. It highlights how fragmented legal frameworks and private compliance systems led to uncertainty in authorizing transactions, inadvertently creating spaces for corruption risks despite sanctions intended to combat them.

The article examines how the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (GLOMAG) and Section 7031(c) of U.S. sanctions laws, designed to combat corruption and human rights abuses, are being weaponized by adversaries to target political and business rivals. It highlights structural vulnerabilities, including vague 'credible information' standards and weak procedural protections, enabling exploitation by oligarchs and authoritarian regimes.

The article argues that U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia have failed to achieve their strategic objectives and do not constitute a coherent foreign policy strategy. As Russia's war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, the Trump administration's willingness to lift sanctions and re-engage Russia economically has proven ineffective in changing Putin's maximalist negotiating position. The author contends that sanctions must be integrated into a broader national security framework rather than used as a reflexive policy tool.

Just Security presents a symposium examining how sanctions and anti-corruption efforts intersect in policy practice. The symposium, supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York, features contributions from experts exploring whether existing sanctions tools can address corruption at scale and how enablers evade accountability.

The article examines how US sanctions programs, particularly Global Magnitsky sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs, effectively disrupt corruption networks by freezing assets and limiting financial access in democratic countries. However, the author argues these sanctions provide only temporary solutions, comparable to a game of whack-a-mole, and are not sufficient without comprehensive policy reforms to close loopholes in financial systems that enable wealth laundering.