Who is really affected by European Union terrorist sanctions? A Critical Study on ‘Proximity’ in EU Case Law

The European Union (EU) adopts restrictive measures – or sanctions – as part of its counterterrorism strategy. These measures restrict the fundamental rights of the natural or legal persons they target and can be challenged in front of the General Court or the European Court of Justice (the CJEU). Drawing from both legal scholarship and security studies, this article refines an analytical framework that enables an original analysis of the case law of the CJEU: we focus on ‘proximity’, an element so far neglected in the analysis of counter-terrorism sanctions. Proximity is the variable measuring the distance between the addressee of a measure from the actual commission of a terrorist act. Such a variable provides the analytical framework through which to test the hypotheses and findings proposed in the last decade by previous studies. Such findings are mostly confirmed by our interdisciplinary analysis, but nuanced. While it is true that sanctions lead to a process of othering and stigmatization, the Court has introduced some meaningful procedural safeguards that contribute to protecting the fundamental rights of individuals, especially in the case of family members of suspected terrorists. Not dissimilarly from what was noted about judicial protection in other sanctions regimes, however, tensions remain in how to ensure effective substantive, as opposed to merely procedural, protection to sanctions addressees. Terrorism, EU restrictive measures, Court of Justice of the European Union, fundamental rights, judicial protection