“Sanctions law”: problem statement

The unilateral coercive measures of states also wrongly called sanctions have occupied a significant place in law; the current state of the latter is analyzed. The complex set of legal rules have appeared concerning sanctions exactly, countersanctions targeted against them and their legal consequences as well as restrictions, prohibitions and exemptions caused by the sanctions policy. Lawyers have to deal with numerous conflicts related to the implementation of prohibitions imposed on already highly complex structure of the foreign economic activity’s regulation.
It impacted the perception of law from the point of view of systematic approach as soon as it needs to be determined what area of law the unilateral state restrictions belong to and what is the relationship between the national and the international legal regulation hereof from a formal legal point of view. The sanctions are considered by the author within the context of the correlation between legal systems and the logic of interaction between them. Nowadays the sanctions law is the combination of disparate legal provisions and practices allowing to use the sanctions as the instrument in the global competitive clash. Historical and comparative legal analysis methods enable to confirm that the terminological substitution happened at a certain historical point: the term “sanctions” began to be used in relation not only to measures taken by the Security Council under the UN Charter, but also to unilateral state acts. Dialectical and logical approaches allowed to trace the meaning and the purpose of the international legal regulation in the sphere of international trade and economic relations. It has always been aimed to remove any barriers and obstacles to the free movement of goods, services, capitals and labor. Therefore, an arbitrary and uncontrolled sanctions pressure contravenes the meaning and the purpose of the existing international law. The regulation of the unilateral state restrictions shall be interrelated at the level of legal systems and be based on the rules of the international law providing for the free trade and commercial exchange without trade barriers. The importance of the distinction between sanctions provided for by the international law and countermeasures as the means of states response to the violation of law committed by another state is emphasized. The author concludes that it is necessary to adopt the special international legal regulation regarding the conditions of imposing countermeasures, suggests to use the provisions of the Draft Articles on State Responsibility and substantiates the need for the establishment of the international competition law.

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