On Monday, the 6th of July, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced a long-awaited tool of diplomacy – the so-called ‘Magnitsky Sanctions’ instituted to combat human rights abuses by individuals. The Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020 serve as a statutory instrument to further the goals of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 and mark the United Kingdom’s commitment to protecting the rights to life, to freedom from torture, to freedom from slavery overseas. The new sanctions will grant the power to prohibit entrance to the UK, curb redirection of money through the country, and prevent profiting from the British economy through their assets. Ultimately, Raab’s new measures are a quasi-blacklisting economically and diplomatically and represent a powerful statement in the UK’s first move beyond the supervision of the United Nations or European Union.

The government has been transparent with the initial ‘target list’ of the new legislation; the sanctions are intended to reach 25 Russian nationals involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky (after whom the parallel legislation passed in the United States in 2012 was named) who exposed the Russian government’s fraudulent overtake of three companies. In addition to this, economic consequences will be faced by the Saudi Arabian nationals implicated in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, perpetrators of the Rohingya Muslim genocide in Myanmar, and organisations utilising forced labour in North Korea.

The move is most certainly one welcome by many since it reaffirms the importance of human rights in a world which is increasingly seeing their violation by regimes across the globe. It shows a trend of almost conceptualising respecting human rights as the most valuable commodity when organising a state’s economic dealings with others, mirrored by the apprehension of the international community to admit Turkey to the EU in the face of accusations of violations of human rights. According to Human Rights Watch, these include “detaining and convicting without compelling evidence of criminal activity individuals and groups the Erdoğan government regards as political opponents.”

Economic sanctions irrefutably hold primacy in the toolkit of international law measures, but they are equally perceived as infamously ineffective. According to Drs of Political Science Adrian U-Jin Ang and Dursun Peksen, multilateral economic sanctions have an approximate efficacy of 33 per cent, and one immediately doubts their power when exercised unilaterally. The Foreign Secretary told parliamentarians that those outlined will not be free “to waltz into this country, to buy up property on the King's Road, to do their Christmas shopping in Knightsbridge”, provoking further questions as to the strength of legislation which will ultimately impact their lifestyles most and does not yet include overseas territories with notoriety as tax havens. Critics and sceptics of the measures exist on all sides of the political spectrum – The Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy expressed a "serious concern" that the Government did not include corruption in the scope of these regulations, saying that "corruption and human rights abuses go hand in hand".

Overall, it seems as if the measures are yet to have been carved out to maximise their impact in meeting the goals of truly condemning human rights abuses and minimising the potential for retaliatory sanctions, as hinted at by the Russian Embassy in London. Nonetheless, this new age of human rights protection appears to be one which will redefine the role of international law as we know it, potentially allowing economic and human rights statements to run parallel in shaping the global society as we know it.

by Dite Bagdonaite

Dominic Raab’s Economic Sanctions: Redefining International Law?