Is the Global Human Rights Sanctions an Emerging Institutionalized Human Rights Enforcement Mechanism

The weakness of the enforcement mechanisms of international human rights law is a longstanding issue. Although there is certain progress, inter alia, UN human rights treaty bodies, ICC and the European Court of Human rights, there are still large numbers of world populations under no effective human rights protection mechanism, and many perpetrators enjoy impunity under the shield of their state boundaries. Human rights sanctions existed for a long time, and in recent years, there is a development in this regard, named global human rights sanctions. Global human rights sanctions, also known as Magnitsky sanctions, was first established in the US in 2016, and have now been adopted by 34 countries, including the UK and EU. The sanctions regime empowers the government to impose travel bans, asset freezes, and transaction restrictions on foreign individuals and entities that commit serious human rights abuses, such as torture, extrajudicial killings and genocide. Unlike the previous state-based sanctions, the global human rights sanctions regimes target specific human rights abuses, meaning that the sanctioning states can use unilateral sanctions to hold perpetrators accountable for serious human rights abuses anywhere in the world. As a transnational regime, Magnitsky sanctions do not require state consent, and are backed by physical force, thus making it possible to enforce international human rights law regardless of state boundaries. My paper aims to discuss whether these newly developed sanctions could be seen as countermeasures in the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, to provide sanctioned state legal consequences for violations of international human rights obligations. The paper will also discuss whether these sanctions regimes created a new type of jurisdiction which allows third-party states to take the responsibility of protecting human rights in other states.