Seeking a Convinced Touchstone in a Turbulent World—the Crossover of Secondary Sanctions and Extraterritorial Jurisdiction

As the landmark studies initiated by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and others have long demonstrated, ‘measures not involving the use of armed force’,1 more commonly referred to as economic sanctions, have been employed as responses to international crises since antiquity.2 Yet, until relatively recently, the legal problems arising from the application of economic sanctions to international corporate activities were not regarded as a central concern in legal scholarship. Sanctions have typically been treated as matters belonging primarily to public international law, while their implications for international economic activities and private actors have received comparatively little attention. However, the landscape surrounding economic sanctions has changed dramatically over the past three decades. The rapid expansion of both unilateral and multilateral sanction regimes has crystallized complex legal challenges for corporations, financial institutions, and other market participants operating across borders. Combined with technological developments in trade, finance, and other areas of economic activity, issues once considered marginal have moved to the centre of international economic law, particularly through the growing assertion of extraterritorial regulatory jurisdictions. Reflecting these developments, recent scholarship on economic sanctions has expanded considerably, with numerous handbooks and monographs devoting sustained attention to extraterritoriality.3