EU sanctions: a person must never be merely a means to an end

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent in any way the editorial position of Euronews. "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." The sentence dates from 1785 (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, AA IV, 429). It marks the boundary of every free state’s authority: a person may be held to account for his own actions. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT But the state may not turn him into a mere instrument of its foreign policy interests. That idea underlies the first sentence of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Article 1(1) of the Basic Law declares human dignity inviolable. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union opens with the same commitment. Article 1 of the Charter obliges every European public authority to respect and to protect the dignity of every human being. The Commission and the Council are on a collision course with these fundamental rights. EU announces sweeping sanctions On 17 August 2026, the Union’s High Representative, Kaja Kallas, announced in an interview with the German daily Welt the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression. According to the figures published, around 1,600 individuals and entities are to be newly designated; the number of listed Russian entities would rise by roughly one third. According to reports from Brussels, new sectoral measures are to be dispensed with in order to speed up the adoption of the listings. Behind every sanctions listing stand frozen property, exclusion from European economic life, travel bans, severed banking relationships and an officially conferred stigma as a supporter of the war. The greater the number of those sanctioned and the higher the speed at which these coercive measures are imposed, the more important become a listing criterion that conforms to fundamental rights and a robust individual factual basis. The EU's most important listing criterion fails the first requirement. Liability without conduct In its current form, so-called criterion (g) covers “leading businesspersons operating in Russia”, their immediate family members and other persons benefiting from them, as well as businesspersons and entities involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Russian government (Article 2(1)(g) of Decision 2014/145/CFSP; Article 3(1)(g) of Regulation (EU) No 269/2014). The criterion requires no support for the war, no part in financing it, no proximity to the Kremlin and no other personally attributable misconduct. It requires nothing but economic relevance in the wrong place. For immediate family members it is enough to benefit from the businessperson; liability attaches to marriage or kinship and to a share in his wealth, and here too no conduct of one’s own is required. It is guilt by association. On 26 March 2026, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice endorsed this construction in a judgment on five joined cases. On that view, a listing criterion may cover categories of persons that have an even merely indirect objective link with the third country concerned; the manner in which that link is expressed in the criterion's constituent elements cannot call its validity into question (paras 289 and 290). The influence of leading businesspersons is to be understood in purely economic terms; neither a personal link with the Russian government nor any actual ability to exert influence need be shown (paras 167 and 181; Court of Justice, judgment of 26 March 2026, Joined Cases C-696/23 P and others, Pumpyanskiy and Others v Council, ECLI:EU:C:2026:245). Can a legal order turn people into instruments of pressure? The Court knew this objection well. The appellants had expressly argued that criterion (g) targets people for what they are, not for what they do, and leaves them unable to tell what conduct they would have to change in order to escape the sanctions. The Court itself records this argument and rejects it nonetheless: for the criterion to be lawful, an even merely indirect objective link between the category of persons covered and Russia suffices; such a criterion becomes unlawful only where it is manifestly inappropriate to the attainment of its objective (paras 289 to 293). Precisely because the Court knew the objection, the gap in its examination weighs all the more heavily. It answers the question whether the criterion is manifestly inappropriate as a means of exerting foreign policy pressure. It does not answer the prior question whether a legal order may turn a human being into an instrument of that pressure at all, although neither misconduct of his own is presupposed nor any lawful conduct by whose change he could end the sanction. The one is a matter of expediency and proportionality within a wide margin of political appreciation. The other is a limit set by human dignity. Approving the criterion under the standard of manifest inappropriateness does not answer the objection under Article 1 of the Charter; rather, it documents that the objection has gone unexamined. Listed individuals intended to pressure the Russian government What the personal sanction is nevertheless meant to achieve has been described with unusual candour by the General Court of the European Union. The influence which those persons are likely to exert on the Russian regime is to be exploited “by compelling them to put pressure on that government to have it change its policy with regard to Ukraine” (General Court, judgment of 3 September 2025, T-1117/23, Usmanov v Council, para. 54). The criterion requires no war-related conduct of one's own. Its declared purpose is nonetheless to bend the will of the person concerned, to degrade him into an agent of foreign policy interests and to instrumentalise him as a means of pressure against another sovereign. How little confidence the Council has in its own construction is revealed by the conclusions of the published statements of reasons. Where those statements reach beyond the mere finding of status, they routinely culminate in formulaic attributions of guilt: "Therefore he actively supported materially or financially and benefited from Russian decision-makers responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine." That is an assertion of individual responsibility, in the very language of the support criteria whose proof criterion (g) is designed to make dispensable. In court, it is enough that the status is established; the alleged support for Russian decision-makers then no longer has to be proven. In the Official Journal, the accusation nevertheless remains. To the public, individual guilt is proclaimed; to the courts, it is declared legally irrelevant. The stigma of the war supporter remains. A sanctions criterion with no way out Sanctions can pursue different preventive purposes. They can withdraw resources, raise economic costs or generate political pressure. But an individual listing whose judicially described purpose is precisely to force the listed person into a particular course of conduct must answer an elementary question: what exactly can this human being lawfully do to bring the coercion imposed on him to an end? For the arms supplier, the answer is: stop the deliveries. For the financier of military activities: end the financing. For the sanctions evader: cease the evasion. For the person caught by criterion (g), there is no corresponding answer. His listing attaches not to an act whose termination he could bring about, but to his position, his family or the revenues of an entire economic sector. Where the state’s revenues consist of taxes and other levies owed by law, the contradiction becomes particularly clear. The person concerned must pay. If he refuses to pay, he breaks the law; the state will enforce the claim and hold him criminally liable. The Council does not expressly call for tax evasion. The criterion simply names no lawful conduct by which the person concerned could remove the supposedly sanctionable state of affairs. Paying taxes does not amount to supporting a regime The Union courts know the difference between voluntary support and a legal obligation to pay. The mere payment of taxes must not be taken as proof of financial support for a regime (General Court, judgment of 9 December 2014, T-441/11, Peftiev v Council, para. 188; judgment of 6 October 2015, T-276/12, Chyzh and Others v Council, para. 169). For criterion (g), the Court added in the Rashnikov case that the tax payments of the person concerned are not what matters. What counts are the revenues of the entire sector, which are not necessarily paid by that businessperson himself (General Court, judgment of 13 September 2023, T-305/22, Rashnikov v Council, paras 96 to 98). The sanction is thus expressly decoupled from any contribution and attributable conduct of the person sanctioned. Nor does the sale of companies or shareholdings offer a reliable way out. Since 2025, the regulation has contained an express continuation rule for leading businesspersons who have transferred ownership, control or the economic benefit of their business interests after 24 February 2022: the transfer does not as such end the listing; the person concerned must demonstrate with current and reliable information that the criterion is no longer met (Article 3(1b) of Regulation (EU) No 269/2014, inserted by Regulation (EU) 2025/903 of 13 May 2025). The Grand Chamber has confirmed that reading: even someone who has resigned his offices and, by selling his shares, lost all control over his companies may still count as a leading businessperson; former status, former functions and the economic weight of the company suffice (Court of Justice, judgment of 26 March 2026, Joined Cases C-696/23 P and others, Pumpyanskiy and Others v Council, paras 182 to 184). The status has a beginning, but no defined end. A criterion that presupposes no misconduct thus at the same time makes it harder to remove the status on which it rests. A further design flaw appears in the sector logic. Money is fungible. Revenues from steel, banking, software or food all increase the general capacity of the state budget. That may justify sectoral trade or financial restrictions. But it does not explain why the entire assets of a particular natural person may be frozen although that person’s own contribution is neither established nor even required. If the issue is the revenue of an economic sector, the sector must be regulated. If the issue is the conduct of a human being, that conduct must be established. Criterion (g) conflates the two. It takes the fiscal significance of a sector and, without any individual ground of attribution, converts it into an existential measure against individual persons. Double standards How little the Union itself treats sector membership as a sufficient personal accusation is shown by its own economy. According to the surveys of the KSE Institute and the B4Ukraine coalition, more than two thousand international companies were still operating in Russia in mid-2025. In 2024 they generated revenues there of around 201 billion US dollars and paid at least 20 billion US dollars in taxes; since the beginning of the war, the figure is said to exceed 60 billion US dollars (KSE Institute/B4Ukraine, Corporate Complicity, August 2025). Seventeen of Russia's twenty largest foreign corporate taxpayers come from G7 and EU states. The largest European among them is Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International, with 402 million US dollars in profit tax in 2024 alone; the top five also include Philip Morris (220 million), Japan Tobacco (182 million) and the French home improvement chain Leroy Merlin (128 million). German companies generated 19 billion US dollars in revenue in Russia in 2024 and paid 594 million US dollars in taxes (KSE Institute/B4Ukraine, ibid.). On paper, the criterion is not tied to nationality. In practice, however, origin is the feature that separates comparable Western corporate leaders from the listed Russian businesspeople. The Council might object that Russian entrepreneurs wield greater political influence. That is how the Council itself justified the current version of the criterion in 2023: by a relationship of mutual benefit and support between the Russian government and leading businesspersons (recital 4 of Decision (CFSP) 2023/1094). But under the endorsed interpretation of the criterion, that is precisely the connection it does not have to prove; economic significance suffices. If economic position is to carry the attribution, then Western owners and managers in the same sectors are in a comparable situation. Their non-listing therefore raises questions under the guarantee of equality in Article 20 of the Charter ("Everyone is equal before the law."). The Court of Justice dismissed the equality objection in formal terms: the criterion, it said, does not distinguish by nationality. That, however, does not answer the practical question why Western owners and managers who produce the same economic effect in the same sectors remain untouched throughout. In practice: Russian, wealthy, guilty Incomplete sanctions are not unlawful merely because they fail to capture every conceivable source of revenue. But the selectivity refutes the claim that a sector’s mere contribution to the Russian budget justifies the personal economic destruction of its leading businesspeople. If that revenue effect were the decisive ground of attribution, it would have to apply regardless of the passport. In practice the rule is: Russian, rich, guilty. Similarly contradictory is the continuing European purchase of Russian energy. In the third year of the war, according to the data of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, 21.9 billion euros flowed from the Union’s economic area for Russian fossil fuels, more than the 18.7 billion euros it provided to Ukraine in financial assistance in the same year (CREA, report of 24 February 2025; financial assistance according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker, excluding military and humanitarian aid). In the first half of 2025, the Union remained the largest importer of Russian liquefied natural gas and increased its imports by seven per cent year on year (IEEFA, European LNG Tracker). Under legacy contracts, Russian LNG may be purchased until 1 January 2027, pipeline gas via TurkStream until autumn 2027 (19th sanctions package). This political trade-off may be explicable on grounds of security of supply. But it deprives the Council of the possibility of treating the mere fiscal effect of economic activity as a sufficient substitute for personal guilt or responsibility. Coercion without coercible conduct The German Federal Constitutional Court describes human dignity through its object formula: a human being must not be degraded into a mere object of state action, nor into a mere means to ends set by others (BVerfGE 27, 1 [6]; 109, 279 [312 f.]; 115, 118 [153]; 144, 20 para. 539). Not every burden imposed by the state therefore violates dignity. Law constantly imposes duties on people and pursues general purposes through legislation. The line is crossed when the person’s status as a subject is disregarded as a matter of principle. Property may be restricted on grounds of the public interest. Human dignity cannot be weighed against foreign policy expediency. Here lies a decisive difference from the other fundamental rights affected. Property, the freedom to conduct a business or private life may be restricted under the conditions of Article 52(1) of the Charter and weighed against legitimate objectives of general interest. Article 1 of the Charter, by contrast, opens with the declaration that human dignity is inviolable. Once a human being has been degraded into a mere means of state policy, that interference cannot be justified by the particular weight of the foreign policy objective. Human dignity is not an item in a cost-benefit calculation. The more important the political goal, the more means a state may be permitted to deploy; the human being himself it may not turn into a means. People held hostage by politics That is exactly what happens here. The listed person is not burdened on account of any attributable war-related conduct. There is no lawful path by which he could end the interference through a change in his behaviour. Rather, his economic existence is exploited in order to act, through him, upon a government for whose decisions he is not responsible. The Council thus claims the power to steer the policy of the Russian government indirectly through existential economic coercion of private individuals. Understood as a means of coercion, the measure lacks any coercible conduct. Understood as a response to a status, it takes on a punitive character: the severest disadvantages without an act, without an individual accusation and without guilt. Understood as the conscription of an uninvolved person to avert a danger created by someone else, it collides with the elementary principle governing the treatment of persons not responsible for a danger: the uninvolved person must not be degraded into a mere instrument of state danger prevention as long as the state has means of its own. The Union has at its disposal sectoral sanctions, export and import bans, financial measures, diplomacy, criminal prosecution and military support for Ukraine. There is no state of emergency that could justify permanent freezing of the assets of a private individual who bears no responsibility, and the further infringements of his fundamental rights. The term is harsh but accurate: whoever imposes existential burdens on A in order to move B to change his behaviour is using A as a hostage of his policy. The gravity of Russia’s war of aggression changes nothing here, for it does not suspend the state’s obligation to respect fundamental rights. The compelled political confession How is the person concerned supposed to end the sanction? The unspoken answer is: distance yourself. Oppose. Deploy your influence against the Russian leadership. The interference with property thus becomes an interference with political freedom. Freedom of expression protects silence too (Article 5(1) of the Basic Law; Article 11 of the Charter). The principle of democracy presupposes that political will is not produced by existential state coercion. A public authority may criticise political positions and contradict them. But it may not strip a human being of his economic rights so that he will engage, vis-à-vis one state, in the political activity desired by another. That such activity can trigger considerable personal and criminal risks in Russia aggravates the interference; it is not what first establishes it. The violation lies already in the fact that (economic) liberty and property are used as a pledge for a political confession. The judge from London How problematic this logic is can be seen from Lord Leggatt’s dissent in the judgment of the United Kingdom Supreme Court of July 2025 on the sanctioning of the British citizen Eugene Shvidler (Shvidler v Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, [2025] UKSC 30). The majority upheld the sanctions by four votes to one. Leggatt, by contrast, examined the asserted chain of effect: Shvidler was to influence his former business partner Abramovich, Abramovich to influence Putin, and Putin, finally, to change his war policy. Leggatt called this chain of reasoning unproven "armchair theories". The expectation that the person concerned should at once possess closeness to the leadership in order to exert influence and at the same time distance himself from it was, he found, contradictory. The attempt to move him by sanctions to sharper public statements against the war he called "Orwellian". A court, he warned, must hesitate before accepting the punishment of an innocent man as a legitimate instrument of policy to motivate others. He recalled Admiral Byng, whom the British Admiralty had shot in 1757, in Voltaire's words from Candide: "pour encourager les autres". British law is not Union law. But the logical and human rights question is the same: may the state impose severe burdens on a person to whom the conduct to be changed cannot be attributed, in order to influence others through him? Why Berlin must not consent Listings under Decision 2014/145/CFSP are, as a rule, adopted and renewed unanimously in the Council. A German abstention need not prevent the decision; against an express German No, however, the foreign policy listing decision cannot come into being or be renewed. If the Federal Government consents, it therefore bears direct political and constitutional responsibility. In the Council, the Federal Government acts as German state power. In its BND judgment, the Federal Constitutional Court made clear that the German state’s obligation to respect fundamental rights does not end at the national border (BVerfGE 154, 152). For participation in Union acts there is, in addition, the narrower but insurmountable limit of constitutional identity: human dignity and the human rights core of the principle of democracy are placed beyond surrender by Article 79(3) and Article 23(1), third sentence, of the Basic Law (BVerfGE 123, 267, Lisbon; BVerfGE 140, 317, European Arrest Warrant II). German constitutional organs may not create, implement or maintain Union acts that violate that identity, and they must work towards the removal of qualified excesses of competence (BVerfGE 154, 17, PSPP). Identity review is a narrow exception, created precisely for the case in which the integration-proof core of human dignity and democracy is affected. If criterion (g), by instrumentalising the human being, is incompatible with Article 1(1) of the Basic Law and with the human rights core of the principle of democracy, then German consent to a listing based on it is unconstitutional as well. That the Court of Justice has approved criterion (g) does not answer the question of human dignity. The Grand Chamber’s published reasoning addresses property, the freedom to conduct a business, private life, equal treatment, effective judicial protection and proportionality (Articles 7, 16, 17 and 47 in conjunction with Article 52(1) of the Charter; Court of Justice, judgment of 26 March 2026, Joined Cases C-696/23 P and others, Pumpyanskiy and Others v Council). There is no independent examination of the criterion against the standard of Article 1 of the Charter and the instrumentalisation of the human being. The Federal Government cannot shed its obligation under Article 1(1) of the Basic Law on the ground that a decisive objection was not autonomously examined in Luxembourg. If it consents to an individual listing that rests solely on a criterion which uses human beings, without attributable and lawfully changeable conduct, as a means of foreign policy pressure, it is not merely implementing European law. It is crossing the boundary within which Germany may take part in European integration. Constitutional identity, moreover, establishes more than a mere prohibition on consent. From the duty of the constitutional organs actively to work towards the removal of states of affairs that violate that identity (BVerfGE 154, 17, PSPP) follows a duty to object: in so far as a listing is also based on criterion (g), the Federal Government must press in the Council for the deletion of that basis and object to renewal for as long as the listing is not carried by a constitutionally sound criterion with a robust factual basis. Mere abstention amounts to de facto participation. 'Slipshod evidence' The criterion is the first breach of the law. The factual basis of its application is the second. This second design flaw concerns the factual foundation of individual sanctions. Under Kadi II, the Union judicature must verify that at least one of the reasons carrying the listing rests on a "sufficiently solid factual basis". The burden of proof lies with the Council (Court of Justice, judgment of 18 July 2013, Joined Cases C-584/10 P, C-593/10 P and C-595/10 P, Kadi II, paras 119 and 121). The Union courts do not exclude press articles as evidence. Press articles are among the sources on which the Council may in principle draw (General Court, judgment of 15 November 2023, T-193/22, OT v Council, para. 115). The body of evidence must be sufficiently specific, precise and consistent (ibid., para. 124). For press articles, the case law additionally requires several different sources (General Court, judgment of 16 October 2024, T-201/23, CRA v Council, para. 77). Several references, however, are not necessarily several sources. Five articles may all go back to the same agency report, the same anonymous informant or the same original text. Their repetition then confirms not the allegation but only its circulation. The Council must therefore disclose the chain of sources and verify whether genuinely independent original findings exist. Nor are anonymous journalistic sources an evidentiary privilege of the state. A media outlet may keep an informant’s identity secret for good, legally protected reasons. But it does not follow that the Council may make the consequently unverifiable allegation the basis of a complete asset freeze. Source protection protects the journalist. It replaces neither the Council’s duty of verification nor its burden of proof. Journalists can uncover facts that the authorities overlook. Press reports can trigger investigations and corroborate state findings. But in a measure of this gravity they must not take the place of state fact-finding without independent verification. What was found in the 'working papers' How far practice can stray from this standard was shown by Politico on 21 September 2023 in its investigation "On shaky grounds: The secret, slipshod evidence the EU uses to sanction Russian oligarchs". The editors were able to inspect five confidential working papers on sanctions listings. Individual dossiers rested on as few as four, nine or ten openly accessible references. Among them were machine-translated Russian or Ukrainian texts, Wikipedia and Forbes profiles, and a Russian lifestyle site whose journalistic weight lay closer to recipes than to verifiable political reporting. Five dossiers do not prove a systemic failure. They do show that no reliably enforced minimum standard prevents material of this quality from carrying existential interferences with fundamental rights. A Google search result does not become state knowledge by being copied into a confidential Council document. The Usmanov case: courts strip the Council’s narratives of their factual basis I am personally involved in the case that illustrates what follows: I have represented Alisher Usmanov for years in his European personality rights matters. I disclose the sources and distinguish between court judgments, interim injunctions, cease-and-desist undertakings, corrections and mere deletions. A compilation submitted to the Council on 19 August 2026 now documents, from all 27 member states, court decisions and interim injunctions, penalty-backed cease-and-desist undertakings ranging from leading newspapers and broadcasters to the German Federal Criminal Police Office, and corrections or deletions concerning the narratives spread about Usmanov. In total it records 20 court decisions, more than 100 penalty-backed cease-and-desist undertakings and more than 3,000 corrections or deletions. Their accumulation across Europe is of considerable significance for the reliability of the sources the Council has adopted. The submission states that "the Council's reasons and evidence for Mr Usmanov's designation are derived from mass media and social media publications", and draws the conclusion: "If that is the case, then the overwhelming refutation and deletion of the same statements in the mass media must be accepted as exculpatory evidence. The sheer volume of such retractions by far exceeds everything that has been offered as evidence by the Council." Particularly striking is the Council’s handling of one Forbes article. The earlier statement of reasons read: "Usmanov has reportedly fronted for President Putin and solved his business problems." The passage was a verbatim adoption from a Forbes article and the statement, reported there, of an unnamed "expert". In the main proceedings before the Hamburg Regional Court, Forbes could not name a single specific transaction in which Usmanov was supposed to have fronted for the Russian President or solved his business problems. Forbes did not disclose the identity of the source and ultimately defended the statement as a mere expression of opinion. The Hamburg Regional Court prohibited its further dissemination (judgment of 19 January 2024, case 324 O 78/23). The Council may not turn the prohibited passage of the article into evidence in favour of its own measure. Where the original source presents neither facts nor examples and even denies that a factual allegation was made at all, a public authority cannot maintain the allegation against its own source if it has no evidentiary basis of its own. After the Hamburg judgment, the Council did delete the precise formula that Usmanov had "fronted" for Putin and solved his business problems. The General Court of the European Union later treated this linguistic change, of all things, as proof that the Council had "taken account of" the Hamburg judgment (General Court, judgment of 3 September 2025, T-1117/23, Usmanov v Council, paras 179 to 181). Today's statement of reasons shows how little that finding carries. It still asserts that Usmanov is "reputed to have acted on behalf of the President of the Russian Federation in a number of business deals of political and strategic importance". That is not a new factual allegation. "Fronted for the President" becomes "acted on behalf of the President", "reportedly" becomes "reputed", and unnamed "business problems" become unnamed deals of political and strategic importance. The factual core is the same: Usmanov is said to have acted in business dealings as Putin’s representative or agent. The words were exchanged, not the allegation. This also makes the Court’s assessment in paragraph 180 hard to sustain. Whoever equates semantic change with substantive compliance is reviewing formulations instead of facts. That raises considerable doubts about the robustness of this judicial review. Listed individuals are not required to prove their innocence A second Hamburg judgment, delivered after the taking of evidence, sharpens the finding. On 23 January 2026, the Hamburg Regional Court (case 324 O 43/24) prohibited the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from asserting, among other things, that Usmanov had repeatedly acted in the interest of, and presumably "on behalf of the Kremlin" ("im Auftrag des Kremls"). These national judgments have no formal binding force on the Council. A German press court does not rule on the validity of a Union act. But the press law finding means that the party disseminating an incriminating factual allegation has failed to discharge its burden of substantiation and to prove the truth of the claim. In sanctions law, too, it is not the listed person who bears the burden of proving his innocence; it is the Council that bears the burden of establishing a sufficiently solid factual basis. If the journalistic source of origin collapses in adversarial proceedings, the Council must produce independent evidence or remove the allegation. A new formulation is not new evidence; here it is merely the disregard of a court decision, documented in the Official Journal. In Usmanov's proceedings, however, the General Court held that he could not rely on the principle of sincere cooperation under Article 4(3) TEU as a subjective right in the proceedings concerning his individual listing, because that principle governs the relations between the Union and the member states (General Court, judgment of 3 September 2025, T-1117/23, Usmanov v Council, paras 172 and 178). That does not answer the question decisive here; it merely refers it to the institutional level on which Article 4(3) TEU precisely applies. A member state court judgment that, after adversarial examination, rejects the factual basis of an allegation used by the Council cannot therefore be treated as legally meaningless private material. At the very least, together with the Council's duty of periodic review, its burden of proof and the requirement of a sufficiently solid factual basis, it obliges the Council to a substantive reassessment. Article 4(3) TEU may confer no free-standing subjective right on the listed person; still less does it give the Council any power to neutralise the substantive finding of a member state judgment by a new formulation. One journalist v the investigative power of 27 states The case law justifies the admissibility of publicly available sources such as newspaper articles partly on the ground that the Union institutions have no investigative powers of their own in third countries (settled case law; General Court, judgment of 15 November 2023, T-193/22, OT v Council, paras 115 et seq.; likewise judgment of 7 February 2024, T-237/22, Usmanov v Council). For the Council as an authority, that may be formally true. Institutionally, however, the view is incomplete. Every foreign policy listing is decided by the governments of 27 member states. Behind them stand intelligence services, foreign ministries, embassies, financial supervisors, financial intelligence units, police and prosecution authorities, mutual legal assistance instruments and diplomatic channels. No one demands 27 formal certificates of no findings. Nor must every intelligence service have examined every business transaction. But whoever deploys the combined coercive power of 27 states against a single human being must be able to show that the available means of state knowledge were used to test the decisive allegation before falling back on a press article. The Union is thus seriously asserting that the combined investigative power of twenty-seven intelligence services does not suffice to verify a claim for which a single journalist needed no more time than the writing of an article requires. Three possibilities remain. If state authorities possess findings that confirm the press article, the Council must produce their verifiable core. If the information is classified, Article 105 of the Rules of Procedure of the General Court provides a special procedure for security-sensitive and confidential material. If the state authorities have no confirmation, the press article cannot replace the missing factual basis. If the available authorities were never even asked, the listing rests on an investigative deficit, and the Council remains in default of proof. Of course a journalist may occasionally have an informant unknown to any of the 27 intelligence services. It becomes absurd when the Union turns that possibility into a rule of evidence and enforces the unverified claim of a single individual with the monopoly of force of 27 states governed by the rule of law. Either the journalist really does possess better knowledge than all of the Union's intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement apparatuses combined; then the deficient functioning of those apparatuses becomes a question of great urgency. Or the state possesses better knowledge; then it must introduce it into the proceedings in a form reviewable under the rule of law. The third possibility, that no one seriously checked, is unacceptable for a Union of states under the rule of law. Principle and practice What emerges in the end is not a single error but the same mechanism four times over. The Council proclaims individual guilt although criterion (g) requires no individual responsibility. It imposes a means of coercion although the person concerned knows of no lawful conduct by which he could end the coercion. It maintains judicially unsubstantiated factual accusations after an exchange of formulations. And it bases existential interferences on journalistic sources without disclosing any independent confirmation by the intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement apparatuses of the 27 member states. Norm, application, evidence and the treatment of judicial review thus point in the same direction. The person concerned is first turned into a means of foreign policy; then the conditions of that interference are detached so far from personal conduct and verifiable facts that effective defence becomes ever more difficult. The Union is founded on respect for human dignity; yet its courts approve sanctions independently of any personal conduct. Its Charter places the human being at the centre; its court describes his economic influence as something that may be exploited by coercion. Kadi II demands a sufficiently solid factual basis; the Council clings to assertions that their original sources could not substantiate before the courts of its member states. The Treaties demand sincere cooperation; the Council answers judgments with disregard and semantic cosmetics. The Federal Government can no longer hide behind Brussels here. Against its express No, the foreign policy listing decision cannot come into being. Whoever consents to a listing on this basis is not choosing between leniency and severity towards Russia. He is deciding whether human dignity, free political will formation and the burden of proof also apply to politically unpopular targets, or whether fundamental rights are guaranteed only in return for good behaviour. Edward Luttwak, like Augustine some 1,600 years before him, put this insight precisely: “Between us and oppression there is only the rule of law.” The rule of law does not prove itself on the sympathetic. It proves itself on those for whom its observance is least popular. One can uphold criterion (g), or one can respect the human dignity enshrined in Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Not both at once. Joachim Nikolaus Steinhöfel is a German lawyer specialising in media law and freedom of expression. In 2024, he won 16 of 16 cases against the federal government, including proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court. He was also the first lawyer to obtain an interim injunction against Facebook concerning content removals and user bans. His 2024 book, Die digitale Bevormundung, became a bestseller, and his latest book, Der Staat gegen Steinhöfel (2026), published in English as The State v. Steinhöfel, also reached number one. Steinhöfel is based in Hamburg and has represented clients including Alisher Usmanov, Roman Abramovich, Elon Musk and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić.