On Monday 20 February, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra proposed the creation of a sanctions headquarters in Brussels to monitor the risk of circumventing the EU measures against Russia.
“Sanctions are being evaded on a massive scale. We currently have too little capacity in the EU to analyse, coordinate, and promote new sanctions”, he regretted in a speech at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Mr Hoekstra wants the headquarters to be a place where Member States can share information and resources on the effectiveness and evasion of restrictive measures. “A place where we do much more to fight circumvention by third countries”, he insisted.
In concrete terms, this new headquarters would draw up a watch list of sectors and trade flows with a high risk of circumvention, and companies would be obliged to include end-use clauses in their contracts so that their products would not end up in the Russian war machine.
The minister said the EU must also “bring the full force of its collective economic strength” and criminal justice systems to bear on those who help circumvent sanctions “by naming, shaming, sanctioning and prosecuting them”.
See the speech: https://aeur.eu/f/5f6 (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)