Foreign Affairs in Court: Lessons from CJEU Targeted Sanctions Jurisprudence
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Article Foreign Affairs in Court: Lessons from CJEU Targeted Sanctions Jurisprudence Elena Chachko† INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................ 2 I. THE MAKING OF EU SANCTIONS .............................................................. ................................................. 6 A. EU Foreign and Security Policy .................................................................................................. 6 B. Sanctions Decision-Making ......................................................................................................... 8 C. EU Iran Sanctions ........................................................................................................................ 9 D. EU Syria Sanctions .................................................................................................................... 11 II. CJEU JUDICIAL REVIEW OF CFSP SANCTIONS .............................................................. ........................ 12 A. Jurisdiction ................................................................................................................................. 12 B. Standard of Review .................................................................................................................... 14 C. Early Reforms ............................................................................................................................ 18 III. METHODOLOGY .............................................................. ....................................................................... 19 A. The Dataset ................................................................................................................................ 20 B. Data ........................................................................................................................................... 22 IV. FINDINGS .............................................................. ................................................................................. 23 A. Case Results ............................................................................................................................... 23 B. Appeals ....................................................................................................................................... 26 C. Relisting ..................................................................................................................................... 27 D. Second and Third Challenges .................................................................................................... 28 E. Expanding Listing Criteria ......................................................................................................... 29 F. Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 32 V. PROCEDURAL REVIEW IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS .............................................................. ........................... 33 A. Procedural Judicial Review ....................................................................................................... 33 B. CJEU Procedural Review—The Narrow Perspective ............................................................... 37 1. Substantive Policy .......................................................................................................... 38 2. Compliance with Due Process in Individual Designations ............................................ 40 C. CJEU Procedural Review—The Wider Perspective ................................................................. 41 CONCLUSION .............................................................. ................................................................................. 43 † S.J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School; LL.B, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am deeply grateful for the advice and guidance of Jack Goldsmith, Gabriella Blum, and Adam Chilton. I thank Maggie Gardner, Ashley Deeks, Yoav Dotan, Jean Galbraith, Guy Harpaz, Kim Lane Scheppele, Pierre- Hugues Verdier, Alex Chachko, Omer Netzer, Oren Tamir, and Aluma Zernik as well as the participants of the 2016 Doctoral Scholarship Conference at Yale Law School, the 4th SPLS Junior Researchers Conference at Stanford Law School, the 2018 Junior International Law Scholars Association Annual Workshop at American University Washington College of Law, the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) 2018 Annual Conference, and workshops at Harvard Law School for invaluable comments and suggestions. Finally, I thank the Yale Journal of International Law team, Varun Char, Jessica Laird, Anirudh Sivaram and Shikha Garg, for excellent editorial work. 2 THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 44: 1 ANNEX I ...................................................................................................................................................... 44 ANNEX II ..................................................................................................................................................... 49 INTRODUCTION There are many myths about the role of courts in foreign affairs and national security in Western democracies. Traditionally, courts and scholars in different jurisdictions have taken the view that executive action related to foreign affairs has unique attributes, making it ill-suited for review by unelected judges with limited institutional competence.1 This approach has relied on a combination of functional considerations and concerns about the democratic legitimacy of judicial interference with inherently political foreign and security policies. From a functional perspective, one common claim is that courts lack the necessary expertise to handle complex, fast-evolving, and sensitive foreign affairs and national security issues.2 Another common claim is that judicial interference would slow down the Executive and compromise coherence and secrecy, which are essential to the conduct of foreign affairs.3 Louis Henkin observed that there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of the judicial process, which aims to produce relatively stable rules of general applicability in 1. In the U.S. context, see, for example, ALEXANDER M. BICKEL, THE LEAST DANGEROUS BRANCH: THE SUPREME COURT AT THE BAR OF POLITICS 183-98 (2d ed. 1986); ERIC A. POSNER & ADRIAN VERMEULE, TERROR IN THE BALANCE: SECURITY, LIBERTY, AND THE COURTS 18 (2007) (“In emergencies, the judges have no sensible alternative but to defer heavily to executive action, and the judges know this.”); Daniel Abebe & Eric A. Posner, The Flaws of Foreign Affairs Legalism, 51 VA. J. INT’L L. 507, 527-43 (2011); Jide Nzelibe, The Uniqueness of Foreign Affairs, 89 IOWA L. REV. 941 (2004); and Eric A. Posner & Cass R. Sunstein, Chevronizing Foreign Relations Law, 116 YALE L.J. 1170, 1204-07 (2007). While other American scholars have generally acknowledged the tradition of increased judicial deference in foreign affairs and national security as a descriptive matter, they have argued in favor of judicial review in those areas. See, e.g., THOMAS M. FRANCK, POLITICAL QUESTIONS/JUDICIAL ANSWERS: DOES THE RULE OF LAW APPLY TO FOREIGN AFFAIRS? (1992); HAROLD HONGJU KOH, THE NATIONAL SECURITY CONSTITUTION: SHARING POWER AFTER THE IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR 146-48, 218- 24 (1990); Jonathan I. Charney, Judicial Deference in Foreign Relations, 83 AM. J. INT’L L. 805 (1989); Ganesh Sitaraman & Ingrid Wuerth, The Normalization of Foreign Relations Law, 128 HARV. L. REV. 1897 (2015); Anne-Marie Slaughter, Are Foreign Affairs Different?, 106 HARV. L. REV. 1980 (1993) (review of FRANCK, supra). For other jurisdictions, see GEERT DE BAERE, CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES OF EU EXTERNAL RELATIONS 197 (2008) (“A survey of the world’s constitutional traditions suggests that courts tend not to get involved in substantive foreign policy decisions and leave the political institutions (normally the executive) a large margin of discretion, although the desirability and extent of this margin is open to discussion”); CAMPBELL MCLACHLAN, FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW 219-57 (2014) (covering four common law jurisdictions: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom); Eyal Benvenisti, Judges and Foreign Affairs: A Comment on the Institut de Droit International’s Resolution on “The Activities of National Courts and the International Relations of Their State”, 5 EUR. J. INT’L L. 423 (1994); Daphne Barak-Erez, Broadening the Scope of Judicial Review in Israel: Between Activism and Restraint, 3 INDIAN J. CONST. L. 118, 122-123 (2009); and Laura K. Donohue, The Perilous Dialogue, 97 CALIF. L. REV. 357, 385-89 (2009) (discussing deference to the executive on national security matters in the United States and the United Kingdom). 2. See, e.g., FRANCK, supra note 1, at 46-48; Charney, supra note 1, at 809-10; Posner & Sunstein, supra note 1, at 1205-06; Sitaraman & Wuerth, supra note 1, at 1936-38. 3. See, e.g., Sitaraman & Wuerth, supra note 1, at 1938-44. 2019] Foreign Affairs in Court 3 a principled manner, and the flexibility and agility necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs.4 Furthermore, some scholars have argued that there are simply no workable legal standards to apply to decisions related to inherently political foreign affairs and national security issues.5 The familiar democratic legitimacy argument has been that the conduct of foreign affairs invariably requires