By Cathy Haenlein, Sasha Erskine, Elijah Glantz and Tom Keatinge

Sanctions are increasingly being used to tackle a range of specific issues. These include sanctions that respond to human rights abuses, combat corruption and address malicious cyber activity. As sanctions use has broadened, the question of their application to organised criminal activity is increasingly raised; yet the use of sanctions for this reason has remained limited to a specific set of issuers, notably the US, and more recently, the UN. In the UK, the government has advanced its vision of an ambitious post-Brexit independent sanctions regime, with the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 allowing sanctions use ‘in the interests of national security’ (HMG, 2018). New regimes addressing human rights and corruption have emerged. With serious and organised crime deemed a national security threat by the UK government, there is a case to add a sanctions regime to address this particular threat (HMG, 2018). The National Crime Agency itself has called for a legislative amendment to reference serious and organised crime as grounds for sanctions use (HMG, 2021). However, little research or evaluation has been undertaken to assess the impact of sanctions on organised crime. With US sanctions used over almost three decades to disrupt cross-border trafficking, the lack of a body of rigorous relevant research is a key shortcoming. Similarly, few past initiatives have sought to assess the lessons these experiences hold for future sanctions issuers in this space. With interest mounting in the potential use of organised crime-related sanctions, this represents a critical limitation. In seeking to address the gap, this paper reviews existing evidence on the use and impact of sanctions to disrupt organised criminal activity. It focuses on two case studies, Colombia and Libya, in differing regions of the world and with different exposure to organised crime-focused sanctions. While Colombia tops the list of states globally for organised crime-focused sanctions on individuals and entities in its territory (with the third-highest number of relevant listings since 2016), Libya’s exposure is more recent and limited. Libya nonetheless has experience of listings under UN and US country regimes relating to fuel smuggling, people smuggling and human trafficking. Here, it differs markedly from Colombia, which is the epitome of the historic US approach to narcotics-related sanctions. This paper analyses organised crime-related sanctions data, examines the current state of knowledge relating to the implementation and impact of these sanctions, and draws on the tw wo case studies. It identifies a number of factors that influence the effectiveness of organised crime-focused sanctions, including:

• The extent to which the host government of the sanction’s target is willing to cooperate with the sanction’s issuer.

• The extent to which the issuance of sanctions is embedded within a coherent broader strategic approach.

• The overarching focus of the regime within which relevant designations are made.

• The need for clear objectives when applying sanctions.

• Resourcing and engagement of key agencies in both the country of issuance and the target’s host country.

• Divergent levels of vulnerability of key actors across the related illicit trade chain. With these factors and the broader findings of the research in mind, this paper concludes with a set of ten considerations for those countries that may, in the future, consider introducing organized crime-focused sanctions.

SOC ACE Research Paper No. 1. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham. . 2022. 51p.