Lauma Paegļkalna (Judge, Supreme Court of Latvia) and Richard Humphreys (Visiting Scholar, School of Law, Queen's University Belfast, Ireland) have written a paper «Collective Responsibility: Widening the Target for Sanctions Arising from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine».

The crime of aggression committed against Ukraine by the Russian Federation, assisted by Belarus, in February 2022, has highlighted some of the limitations of the current model of sanctions. International law allows a wider scope for sanctions than has been put in place to date by the EU and others, particularly against state actors. A number of areas in which the scope of sanctions could be widened are identified.

As Russian war crimes mount up on a virtually daily basis, and the brutalisation of sovereign Ukraine takes place before the eyes of the world, intensification of existing sanctions along these dimensions warrants consideration.

The full text of the paper is available at the link.