Reforming US Secondary Sanctions: What’s Wrong That Can Be Righted?

In a nutshell, US secondary sanctions are the sanctions that the United States can apply to wholly non-US actors in wholly non-US transactions of which the US administration disapproves. Numerous statutory and executive orders provide authority for imposing secondary sanctions for transactions involving multiple countries, primarily Iran, Russia, North Korea and Venezuela, and involving a wide range of activities, including violating human rights.

Many of these authorities include the ‘nuclear option’ of placing the sanctioned individual or entity on the SDN list. None of these authorities include a well-defined numerical threshold for imposing sanctions, with many requiring sanctions for ‘significant transactions’ or providing ‘material support’. The US administration has identified many persons and entities for sanctions or placed them on the SDN list under these authorities.

So what’s wrong with this?

We do not want to debate the goals of economic sanctions or whether they are preferable to the use of military force, but only to identify some problems with the application of secondary sanctions.

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