FATF report on sanctions enforcement

🇺🇳 When discussing sanctions, we typically focus on G7+ (including the EU) countries, while Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other regions are often ignored. This is always surprising, especially since sanctions on countries like Iran or North Korea are imposed under UNSC resolutions. Therefore, in principle, all countries are expected to enforce these measures effectively or at least try to do so symbolically. However, the 2025 FATF report shows that only 16% of countries have a somewhat effective system for enforcing and implementing such measures.

It means that sanctions compliance efforts are limited to the G7+ area, while many other regions can still be easily exploited to bypass UNSC sanctions on proliferation with minimal effort. What is more notable is that the majority of evasion cases highlighted in the report originated from the EU or are connected to US investigations, which does not mean that only those jurisdictions are used to circumvent these measures, but only that only those jurisdictions have the capacity to track and identify such violations.

One of the main goals for Sanctions Finder is to make it easier for people in the global south to access sanctions data, helping practitioners from those countries identify all sanctions designations and understand various types of prohibitions.