An analysis of the human rights sanction regimes of the United States and Europe

This thesis analyses the human rights sanctions regimes of the United States (the Magnitsky Act and the Global Magnitsky Act) and the European Union (the European Union Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime). These regimes are recent foreign policy developments and the most relevant of their kind. However, sanctions studies are underdeveloped, lacking consensus on matters ranging from defining what a sanction is to the theoretical and empirical approaches that can be used to analyse and study sanctions. Given this, the guiding question of this thesis is: How do the US and EU human rights sanctions regimes differ? To answer this question, the field of sanctions history and the history of sanctions are reviewed. Moreover, the specific institutional and legal pillars of the broader US and EU sanctions systems and specific human rights sanctions regimes are examined. The final analysis attempts to avoid falling into the mainstream tendencies of sanctions scholarship, which focuses too narrowly on one dimension of sanctions. It does so by building a discussion based on conceptual and empirical approaches, which is then complemented with context-specific information that gives a more nuanced understanding of the US and EU human rights sanctions regimes. Ultimately, in direct terms, the analysis results showed that the US regime is broader in scope, more target-rich, and more active than its EU counterpart. Complementary considerations show that the EU may lack effectiveness and action compared to the US due to the different approaches of Member States towards Russia. These also show that the US regime may or may not be influenced by its civil society.