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Veronika Datzer, Shanti Walde, Luigi Lonardo
European Foreign Affairs Review
Volume 29, Issue 1 (2024) pp. 115 – 132
https://doi.org/10.54648/eerr2024005
Abstract
The European
Union (EU) adopts restrictive measures – or
sanctions – as part of its counterterrorism strategy.
These measures restrict the fundamental rights of the natural or legal persons they
target and can be challenged in front of the General Court or the European
Court of Justice (the CJEU).
Drawing from
both legal scholarship and security studies, this article refines an analytical
framework that enables an original analysis of the case law of the CJEU: we
focus on ‘proximity’,
an element so far neglected in the analysis of counter-terrorism sanctions. Proximity
is the variable measuring the distance between the addressee of a measure from
the actual commission of a terrorist act. Such a variable provides the
analytical framework through which to test the hypotheses and findings proposed
in the last decade by previous studies.
Such
findings are mostly confirmed by our interdisciplinary analysis, but nuanced.
While it is true that sanctions lead to a process of othering and
stigmatization, the Court has introduced some meaningful procedural safeguards
that contribute to protecting the fundamental rights of individuals, especially
in the case of family members of suspected terrorists. Not dissimilarly from what
was noted about judicial protection in other sanctions regimes, however,
tensions remain in how to ensure effective substantive, as opposed to merely
procedural, protection to sanctions addressees.
Keywords
Terrorism, EU restrictive measures, Court of Justice of the European Union, fundamental rights, judicial protection
Extract
The European
Union (EU) adopts restrictive measures – or
sanctions – as part of its counterterrorism strategy.
These measures restrict the fundamental rights of the natural or legal persons they
target and can be challenged in front of the General Court or the European
Court of Justice (the CJEU).
Drawing from
both legal scholarship and security studies, this article refines an analytical
framework that enables an original analysis of the case law of the CJEU: we
focus on ‘proximity’,
an element so far neglected in the analysis of counter-terrorism sanctions. Proximity
is the variable measuring the distance between the addressee of a measure from
the actual commission of a terrorist act. Such a variable provides the
analytical framework through which to test the hypotheses and findings proposed
in the last decade by previous studies.
Such
findings are mostly confirmed by our interdisciplinary analysis, but nuanced.
While it is true that sanctions lead to a process of othering and
stigmatization, the Court has introduced some meaningful procedural safeguards
that contribute to protecting the fundamental rights of individuals, especially
in the case of family members of suspected terrorists. Not dissimilarly from what
was noted about judicial protection in other sanctions regimes, however,
tensions remain in how to ensure effective substantive, as opposed to merely
procedural, protection to sanctions addressees.