Targeted sanctions and organised crime: impact and lessons for future use
May 2022
Research Paper 01
Cathy Heinlein, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
Sasha Erskine, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
Elijah Glantz, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
Tom Keatinge, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
SOC ACE Project: Assessing the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool to disrupt serious organised crime
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
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.
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 two case studies to identify a number of factors that influence the effectiveness of organised crime-focused sanctions.
