{"id":1425430,"date":"2026-08-07T11:20:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T08:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/the-echr-clearly-stated-that-the-president-cannot-arbitrarily-and-without-grounds-impose-sanctions-analysis-by-lawyers\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T11:20:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T08:20:47","slug":"the-echr-clearly-stated-that-the-president-cannot-arbitrarily-and-without-grounds-impose-sanctions-analysis-by-lawyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/the-echr-clearly-stated-that-the-president-cannot-arbitrarily-and-without-grounds-impose-sanctions-analysis-by-lawyers\/","title":{"rendered":"The ECHR clearly stated that the president cannot arbitrarily and without grounds impose sanctions \u2013 analysis by lawyers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The unlimited power of the President of Ukraine to impose sanctions on anyone without restrictions is likely to end – this is stated in the publication of the specialized legal publication ” Pravo<\/a> ” “Discretion has limits: how judicial practice in sanctions disputes is changing.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The authors of the publication – lawyers Daryna Artimovets and Olga Konovalova – note that previously, sanctions case law in Ukraine was based on the prerogative of the authorities to determine threats to national security at their own discretion and apply sanctions restrictions preventively, without grounds. One such illustrative case is the imposition of sanctions against the fifth President, Petro Poroshenko.<\/p>\n

The authors state that the Administrative Court of Cassation has relied for years on the fact that the President’s discretion is beyond the scope of judicial control.<\/p>\n

However, the ECHR decision in the case “LLC “M.S.L.” v. Ukraine” changes this situation.<\/p>\n

In its decision, the ECHR emphasizes, in particular, that nothing in the Constitution of Ukraine prohibits courts from assessing the reliability of the information on which the decision on sanctions is based, and Article 124 of the Fundamental Law does not provide for exceptions to the general jurisdiction of courts to resolve legal disputes.<\/p>\n

The result was not just the annulment of a specific decision. The Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court, by its resolution of June 23, 2026 in case No. 800\/162\/16, returned the case of LLC “M.S.L.” for a new consideration, directly instructing the court of first instance to take into account the conclusions of the ECHR and not to limit itself to a formal review. This decision is no longer technical, but sets the framework within which disputes in this category of cases should be considered from now on.<\/p>\n

Similar conclusions are contained in the Grand Chamber’s judgment of 28 April 2026 in case No. 990\/224\/23. Here, the Court structured the review of sanctions disputes around five mandatory aspects: procedural aspect, factual basis, legal qualification, proportionality and absence of arbitrariness. Failure to comply with at least one of these criteria is an independent ground for the lifting of sanctions.<\/p>\n

The authors also recall that two of the five judges who considered Poroshenko’s lawsuit to lift the sanctions disagreed with the panel’s decision of July 10, 2026, and published separate opinions.<\/p>\n

In a separate opinion dated 07\/14\/2026, Judge Radoshevska directly points out that the entire chain of decisions, from the letter to the State Financial Monitoring Service through the order of the Cabinet of Ministers to the decision of the National Security and Defense Council, actually reproduced the same document without independent assessment at each stage. At the same time, the burden of proving the circumstances that pose a threat to national interests lies with the defendant, and not the plaintiff must refute the unproven. And the mechanical copying of the conclusions of one body by other subjects of power cannot be considered “sufficiently specific, accurate and consistent evidence.”<\/p>\n

Regarding the separate opinion of 20.07.2026, Judge Smokovich focuses on the question of whether the financial monitoring body could, given the limits of its powers under the relevant law on the prevention of money laundering, independently identify and qualify a threat to national security of a political nature. The conclusion is negative, since such a body is obliged to transfer the identified information to law enforcement or intelligence structures, and not use it as an independent basis for an interdepartmental chain of sanctions proposals. Hence the thesis of the lack of a legitimate basis already at the first step of the procedure, which, in the judge’s opinion, automatically devalues all subsequent decisions.<\/p>\n

Both separate opinions demonstrate the gap between the declaration of the new standard and the practice of its application. The judicial majority, as the Poroshenko case showed, despite the formal commitment to the five specified criteria, in practice still tends to recognize as sufficient factual justification “trust in the conclusions of the executive authorities without their independent judicial review.”<\/p>\n

At the same time, judges who expressed separate opinions insist that the issue is the quality of the state’s evidentiary work.<\/p>\n

This approach to considering sanctions cases will become a kind of litmus test for how Ukrainian courts will seek a balance between the two requirements of wartime: a rapid response to threats to national security and the obligation to provide real, rather than purely formal, judicial protection for the person to whom sanctions have been applied. The ECHR decision has set a benchmark that cannot be ignored by the national judicial system. <\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The unlimited power of the President of Ukraine to impose sanctions on anyone without restrictions is likely to end – this is stated in the publication of the specialized legal publication ” Pravo ” “Discretion has limits: how judicial practice in sanctions disputes is changing.” The authors of the publication – lawyers Daryna Artimovets and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":1406909,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76871,76872,76873],"class_list":["post-1425430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-2","category-news-feed","category-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1425430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1406909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1425430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prm.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1425430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}