Legality of Extraterritorial Sanctions

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an overview of the different generations of US secondary sanctions, with a focus on the issue of their legality from an international law viewpoint. Insofar as they constitute exercise of jurisdiction on an extraterritorial basis, they may violate, inter alia, the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other States. The convergence between US and EU in the period 2010-2012, when the European restrictive measures substantially mirrored the content of US sanctions against Iran, could not be considered as expression of an overall acceptance of that typology of measures. On the contrary, the European refusal to recognise the effects of secondary sanctions is not a new phenomenon: the Blocking Regulation, which was originally approved in 1996, has been updated after the US decision to re-impose sanctions against Iran in 2018. It is important to assess the effectiveness of the initiatives taken by the EU, by way of countermeasure, in order to neutralise the effects of US extraterritorial jurisdiction. It must be borne in mind that the issue of the jurisdictional scope of unilateral non-forcible measures reflects the inherent tension between centralised sanctions and the autonomous measures outside of the institutional collective security regime.