A prominent French lawyer has warned that the European Union’s sanctions review system now allows targeted individuals to win their cases repeatedly yet remain under restrictive measures. The pattern, she says, raises doubts about whether the judicial oversight still offers any real protection. Writing in Le Journal du Dimanche, Valérie Hanoun of the Paris Bar argues that the EU, which casts itself as the world’s foremost defender of the rule of law, has built a process in which people prevail in court but obtain no practical relief. When that happens repeatedly, she contends, judicial review becomes “formal rather than effective.”
This is “not an argument against sanctions themselves,” Ms Hanoun stresses, and the EU “is right to target those who genuinely sustain Russia’s war.” Her concern is procedural: whether an annulment handed down in Luxembourg actually changes anything.
A question of timing
The first problem is delay. Cases before the General Court typically take 18 to 24 months, while sanctions are reviewed and renewed every six. By the time the court annuls a measure, it has often already expired and been replaced, usually with revised wording but the same effect. Ms Hanoun calls it a “legal shell game” in which the court examines yesterday’s sanctions while today’s still apply, and “the rules of the game shift while the referee is still deliberating.” Because each new act is formally separate, the Council can move the legal target before the judges deliver a remedy.
The case of Dmitry Pumpyansky, former co-owner of Russia’s largest pipe manufacturer, is offered as the clearest illustration. He resigned and sold his shares in 2022; in June 2024 the General Court annulled his earlier sanctions, yet a fresh listing left him restricted on essentially the grounds just rejected. In September 2025 the court annulled the measures again, finding the Council had failed to justify treating him as a “leading businessperson operating in Russia.” Each time one act lapsed, another took its place, a pattern his wife, Galina Pumpyanskaya, also faced.
Winning without relief
The deeper problem, Ms Hanoun argues, is that a courtroom victory does not trigger removal from a sanctions list. That decision rests with the Council, the same body that imposed the measures and defended them, which she frames as an “obvious conflict of interest.” Lawyers increasingly describe an institution that “takes notes during hearings and later rewrites those notes into new sanctions decisions,” correcting the weaknesses a judgment identified and reproducing much the same listing in a fresh act. She points to Maya Tokareva, daughter of the head of Russia’s pipeline operator Transneft, said to have won three cases yet remained sanctioned. When an individual must win repeatedly before a first judgment yields any result, she argues, “judicial oversight risks becoming ritual rather than control.”
The Court of Justice under scrutiny
Ms Hanoun reserves separate criticism for the EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice. Her concern, she stresses, is not simply that the Court frequently sides with the Council, but that the intensity of judicial review appears to weaken precisely in the cases where executive action is most politically sensitive.
First, she argues, the Court leans on the principle of “sanctions effectiveness” without examining whether the measures exert real pressure on Russia. Critics call the criterion an “empty category,” yet one that governs the whole interpretive process. It becomes a self-validating formula, she says, in which restrictions are justified by the general need for sanctions to work, without scrutiny of whether targeting a particular person serves that aim.
Second, the Court has largely stepped back from proportionality review, treating it as more political than legal. That marks a clear departure, she writes, from the stricter standard of Kadi II, where it insisted that even security-driven sanctions remain subject to genuine scrutiny and adequate review of the evidence.
Third, she points to an expansive reading of the listing criteria. Sanctions, the Court has held, need not rest on proof of a direct link between a businessperson and the Russian authorities; it can be enough that the person operates in a revenue-generating sector. The “leading businessperson” test has proved especially broad, challengeable only by showing “manifest inappropriateness,” a threshold she calls extremely hard to meet. Taken together, she warns, this risks “liability by economic category”: a person sanctioned less for proven conduct than for belonging to a broadly defined business group. Some commentators, she notes, have called the Luxembourg court a “rubber stamp.”
A fix within reach
The remedy, Ms Hanoun insists, is procedural and achievable: sanctions challenges should be fast-tracked so that judgments arrive from Luxembourg inside the six-month renewal cycle, using expedited procedures the General Court already possesses but rarely uses; once a listing is annulled, the Council should be obliged to review related acts promptly and either justify or withdraw them; and evidence should be gathered before measures are imposed, not after litigation begins. Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees an effective remedy, she notes, a right that becomes “largely symbolic when success in court changes nothing.” Her closing question is pointed: when a ruling handed down in Luxembourg no longer changes reality, is justice “being done here, or merely performed?”
