The European Union has a favourite thing to say about itself: that it is a community built on the rule of law. The phrase appears in treaties, speeches and press releases with the regularity of a mantra. It is how Brussels distinguishes itself from authoritarian governments. So when the EU's own conduct quietly contradicts that principle, it is worth pausing to notice.
During the latest negotiations over the roll-over of Russian sanctions, Hungary and Slovakia pushed to delist a number of businessmen, most notably Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, using their veto power as leverage.
Both have significantly withdrawn from Russian business life in recent years. Fridman sold his shares in Alfa-Bank, Russia's largest private lender, in 2024, and Usmanov has relocated to his native Uzbekistan, focusing more on non-commercial activities. Both countries argued that their continued designation was no longer justified. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico further circulated to other EU capitals a letter from Turkish President Erdoğan, arguing that Usmanov's continued listing was straining relations with Ankara and Central Asian partners.
Hungary and Slovakia also pointed to the businessmen's active legal challenges before the Court of Justice of the EU as grounds for reconsideration. Whatever one thinks of those governments' broader foreign policy instincts, the framing they chose — that pending court proceedings should carry some weight — was not without logic.
Other member states were unsurprisingly unwilling to accept the proposal. What followed, however, was more revealing. Slovakia offered a compromise: not an immediate delisting, but a conditional commitment — a pledge to delist the two men if and when the CJEU rules in their favour. It asked nothing more than that a judicial ruling carry weight. Somewhat surprisingly, however, this suggestion also found no support in the Council.
Politics versus law
That rejection deserves attention, because it points to something Brussels rarely states plainly: the imposition and lifting of sanctions is a political act. Not a legal one. Political. Full stop. And the refusal to accept Slovakia's compromise raises a sharper question: if the Council truly believed the court would uphold the sanctions, why reject a deal that would make delisting conditional on a favourable ruling? Does this refusal not implicitly concede that the legal case is weak and that, if properly considered under the law, both businessmen would be entitled to have sanctions lifted? Sanctions are adopted by unanimous vote in the Council, a room full of government ministers, and it is there, not in any courtroom, where the real decisions are made.
This has real consequences. The sanctioned individuals have the right to challenge their designation before the EU's highest court. Those proceedings are real. The legal arguments are real. However, by refusing even a conditional commitment to honour a future court ruling, the Council has severed the judicial process from any practical outcome. Litigation becomes theatre. A favourable judgment becomes a piece of paper that member states can file away and forget.
The opacity of the selection criteria makes things worse. A glance at Forbes Russia's wealth rankings tells a story the Council has failed to explain: among the ten richest Russians, roughly half face no EU sanctions at all. No public criteria account for why one billionaire is designated while another with comparable Kremlin exposure is not. If the logic were principled and consistent, it could be reconstructed from the outside. It cannot. The designations track political visibility far more reliably than any discernible legal standard.
The pattern of delistings tells the same story. The handful of people removed from the sanctions list following court challenges have been peripheral figures: relatives of designated persons, secondary associates whose cases were legally thin enough that maintaining them became indefensible.The prominent names stay on, regardless of what judges say. The unspoken rule is straightforward: the higher the political profile, the lower the practical value of a court win. That is not the rule of law. That is politics in legal clothing.
Whatever one's views on the individuals involved, the structural problem here is independent of personalities. The EU cannot credibly claim to be a rule-of-law institution while running a sanctions architecture that is deliberately shielded from judicial consequence.
A workable fix exists: an automatic review mechanism triggered by CJEU rulings, requiring member states to provide explicit, documented justification for maintaining sanctions after a court rules in a designated person's favour. This would not weaken the sanctions regime – it would give it a legal spine, grounding the EU's coercive tools in something more durable than shifting political consensus.
As things stand, the Council's position invites a question it has no good answer to: if a ruling from the EU's own court carries no binding weight in this domain, what exactly is the rule of law being invoked to protect?
That question will not go away. And the longer it does, the more it hollows out the credibility the EU needs to speak with moral authority on anything else.
