13 February 2013
Sharing Responsibility for UN Targeted Sanctions
Cross-posted on EJIL:Talk!
UN targeted sanctions, especially those related to terrorism, have had their fair share of the limelight lately, particularly in view of important decisions by the ECJ, the ECtHR, the UK Supreme Court and others in cases such as Kadi, Nada, and Ahmed. Here, I try to look at this jurisprudence through the lens of the project on shared responsibility (SHARES). After introducing the relevant sanctions regime, I argue that the complex conduct of the UN and its member-states in designing, imposing, and implementing the sanctions leads to them sharing international responsibility for the resulting breach of aspects of the internationally protected right to a fair trial. This is so because states are ‘held responsible’ in their own domestic courts or in regional international courts, which then forces them to turn to the UN and seek to implement the organisation’s international responsibility. In this manner, the international responsibility for what is in effect ‘shared’ conduct is itself shared, in practice. (more…)