WIREDGOV

The government’s recently published sanctions strategy under-promises, overdelivers and sets a vision for the future use of sanctions. Now the work begins.

Recent months have seen a bumper policy harvest in the UK. From the strategic defence review to an updated national security strategy via the China audit, more than a dozen security-related reviews are underway or have been recently completed. Out of this crop, a sanctions review has been one of the least remarked upon. It deserves a closer look.

Blink and You’ll Miss it

The ‘cross-government review of sanctions implementation and enforcement’, published in May, was easy to miss. News of the review’s launch was tucked into a parliamentary answer from sanctions minister Stephen Doughty in November last year. But with no formal terms of reference published and only a vague ministerial commitment to ‘go further and deeper to improve our sanctions system’, it is perhaps no surprise that when the review’s conclusions were published six months later, there was no clamour: just a short parliamentary debate and no media coverage.

The bland and slightly misleading title adds further confusion. The occasion for starting the review may well have been a cross-party consensus that sanctions enforcement ‘was not where you would expect it to be’, as foreign secretary Lammy surmised before the Commons foreign affairs committee, but the review’s far-reaching remit goes beyond ‘implementation and enforcement’ and included ‘examining whether we have the right powers, approach, capacity and resourcing on policy’, as parliamentary questions revealed.

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