Crime and Sanctions: Beyond Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool

Targeted sanctions, namely asset freezes and travel bans, are no longer the province of foreign policy alone. Governments increasingly use them in response to crime, such as corruption, human rights abuse, cybercrime, drug trafficking, and transnational organized crime. Such sanctions are imposed based on permissive evidential standards, such as “credible evidence” or “reasonable grounds to suspect.” Their advent has added a new layer to a multi-tier system of state responses to crime. First, there is the traditional approach of criminal prosecution and conviction based on the criminal standard of proof. Second, one rung below is non-conviction-based asset forfeiture, a notionally civil confiscation of supposed proceeds of crime that eschews the need for compliance with a suite of criminal trial safeguards. The third level of this hierarchy includes crime-based targeted sanctions, which vest the state with great latitude in dealing with suspected criminals. Based on a wide-ranging analysis of international practice, this Article contends that not only are crime-based sanctions de facto a criminal justice tool, they are a coherent set of principles required to determine their relationship with other responses to criminal behavior.