The lack of EU sanctions enforcement was evident for a long time, the EU finally decided to handle it. The effectiveness of sanctions pressure depends much more on their enforceability.
A week ago the EU adopted the seventh package of sanctions against Russia that targets jewellery, gold, certain individuals and companies and the shipbuilding industry — which is involved in the theft of Ukrainian grain. Despite the importance of growing pressure, another development on the sanctions track deserves close attention.
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The European Commission proposed introducing liability for sanctions violations as a serious crime at the level of the European Union. The Commission recognised that the sanctions worked but that there was no mechanism for monitoring their implementation. Recognition of this by the EU means that the member states have failed to implement the common sanctions policy properly.
Bohdan Bernatskyi
Future of Ukraine Fellow
Bohdan Bernatskyi is a Visegrad Insight Fellow as of 2022. As a Senior Lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (and Ostroh Academy) he teaches Diplomatic Law, Public International Law, Countermeasures and Law of Treaties. In 2019, he defended PhD thesis on banning political parties in Ukraine and abroad. Since then, Bohdan has become a member of the Parliamentary working group on reforming party legislation in Ukraine.
Bohdan serves as an independent Legal Consultant at Project Expedite Justice (2022-currently), Future of Ukraine Fellow at Visegrad Insight (2022-currently). He was a Legal Adviser to Ukrainian MPs (2020-2022), and Democracy Reporting International (2015-2019).
His professional track of record includes thorough expertise in the fields of sanctions and transitional justice initiatives. He is the author of the complex changes to Ukrainian sanctions infrastructure which aimed at converging UA foreign policy tools to EU best practices. Given EU candidate status to Ukraine, the idea to deepen cooperation within EU-UA CFSP, including sanctions, will gain more currency.
Bohdan participated as an Independent Expert in the transitional reform group launched by the Ministry of Reintegration of Ukraine. All efforts related to building solutions for sustainable peaceful reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine was brutally interrupted by Russia on February 24th, 2022. The aftermath of the war will require harder approaches to transitional measures and Bohdan will contribute to this development.
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