WHO DO I CALL FOR AN EU SANCTIONS EXEMPTION?: WHY THE EU ECONOMIC SANCTIONS REGIME SHOULD CENTRALIZE LICENSING

摘要

The international response to violent government crackdowns against "Arab Spring" protestors, and to the Iranian nuclear crisis, featured the emergence of a new powerful player on the global economic sanctions scene - the European Union. Deviating from its stated policy, the European Union sanctioned autonomously and holistically in Libya, Syria, and Iran, imposing broad-based, categorical restrictions on doing business in those countries. These new measures suggest that the European Union increasingly will employ "holistic" sanctions to achieve its foreign policy objectives in the future. Given its relative nascence, however, concerns exist regarding the ability of the EU sanctions regime to manage the risks of holistic sanctions, which include the potential for conflicts of law, preclusion of legitimate trade, and collateral damage to ordinary citizens. The United States, a longtime proponent of holistic sanctions, manages these risks with the robust licensing practices of the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The European Union currently lacks a centralized licensing agency like OFAC and instead delegates licensing responsibilities to each of its twenty-seven "Member States." This Article explores the impact of the European Union's decentralized approach to licensing. The Article begins by chronicling the development of the EU sanctions regime through the successive European integration treaties. Following a review of modern EU sanctions policy and recent sanctions in the Middle East, the Article finds that divergence in foreign policy, administrative infrastructure, and resourcing among EU Member States can lead to inconsistent licensing practices and frustrated compliance efforts. The Article concludes that to ensure its effectiveness as a sanctioning body going forward, the EU must establish a centralized licensing infrastructure, like OFAC's, that achieve three "core competencies" essential to addressing the risks of holistic sanctions: flexibility, the ability to mitigate collateral damage, and adaptability.