The blocking statute is Europe's answer to American sanctions. Its second paragraph is a form for asking permission to obey them.

On 23 September the Dutch foreign minister told a Dutch newspaper that the Netherlands has asked the European Commission to prepare the blocking statute, against the possibility of wider American sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Anadolu Agency, reporting the interview from the margins of the UN General Assembly, has him calling it a last resort and saying the Netherlands is prepared to use it.

The instrument is Council Regulation (EC) No 2271/96, thirty years old this November. It is short, it is in force, and it is mostly invoked by people who have not read past Article 5's first paragraph. The second paragraph is where the architecture is.

What it forbids, and of whom

Article 5, first paragraph: no person referred to in Article 11 "shall comply, whether directly or through a subsidiary or other intermediary person, actively or by deliberate omission" with any requirement or prohibition resulting from the laws in the Annex. Not may resist. Shall not.

Article 11 is the scope, and it is five kinds of person: residents of the Union who are nationals of a Member State; legal persons incorporated within the Community; shipping operators under Regulation 4055/86; "any other natural person being a resident in the Community, unless that person is in the country of which he is a national"; and anyone within the Union acting in a professional capacity.

Read that against the Court and the answer arrives in two halves. The ICC is not on the list. It is not a legal person incorporated within the Community, and the Regulation says nothing about international organisations at all. Its officials may well be: the president, Tomoko Akane, is Japanese, and the senior trial lawyer designated alongside her in August, Abdoulaye Seye, is Senegalese, and OFAC's own designation record of 18 August 2026 gives both an address in the Netherlands. On the text, that makes them fourth-indent persons. This is a reading, ours, of a provision drafted in 1996 for exporters. Nobody has published a better one.

Three duties travel with the prohibition. Article 2 requires an affected person to tell the Commission within 30 days, and where the person is a company that duty falls on "the directors, managers and other persons with management responsibilities" — a board obligation that almost nobody has on a register. Article 4 makes a foreign judgment or administrative decision giving effect to a listed law unrecognised and unenforceable here. Article 6 creates an entitlement to recover damages caused by the application of a listed law. We read Article 6's first paragraph in full. It creates the entitlement. It does not, there, name a defendant with an office in Brussels.

The list is the instrument

None of this reaches anything except "the laws specified in the Annex". We opened the Annex on 25 September. It holds eight instruments: three about Cuba, five about Iran. The Commission's own page puts it in one sentence, that the annex currently consists of US measures concerning Cuba and Iran.

Executive Order 14203 of 6 February 2025 is not among them. Nothing touching the ICC is. So on the day the Dutch minister spoke, the blocking statute did nothing whatever for anyone designated under that order — not because the Union weighed it and declined, but because the Annex is a list and no line has been added to it. The Parliament has been asking since 2025, in resolutions and written questions we could not open and therefore do not quote. The Annex we could open, and it is what it was in 2018.

The second paragraph

Then Article 5's second paragraph. Persons "may be authorized ... to comply fully or partially to the extent that non-compliance would seriously damage their interests or those of the Community."

Their interests. The applicant's. The party asking for permission to freeze the money, not the party whose money it is.

Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1101 sets out how that is assessed. A written application to the Commission's Service for Foreign Policy Instruments, evidence of serious damage, and fourteen non-cumulative criteria at Article 4, running from specific risk to the protected interest through bankruptcy exposure and employment effects to point (n), "any other relevant factor". The Regulation sets no deadline for the Commission to answer. It says nothing about publishing what the Commission decides.

What that looks like when it happens is on the public record exactly once, and only because somebody sued. In November 2018 the United States designated IFIC Holding AG, a German company held indirectly by the Iranian state. Clearstream Banking AG, the German depository holding its securities, stopped paying the dividends and asked the Commission for permission to comply. It received three permissions: C(2020) 2813 of 28 April 2020, C(2021) 3021 of 27 April 2021, and C(2022) 2775 of 26 April 2022, twelve months each.

IFIC brought an action for annulment. On 12 July 2023 the General Court dismissed it (T-8/21) and held that Article 5(2) requires the Commission to weigh the applicant's interests and the Union's and not those of the third party targeted by the foreign measures; that the legal framework does not require the designated person to be heard, since hearing them could reveal the application to the authorities of the third country; and that the Commission was under no obligation to examine less onerous alternatives.

A German company's dividends, frozen in Germany by a German institution, under three Commission decisions it was not entitled to comment on before they were taken, made under the Regulation written to prevent exactly that freezing. Every step is lawful, and the Court explained why at length. It is also the entire architecture on one page.

Four questions, and they have four different answers

For any organisation whose bank, depository, cloud provider or payroll bureau serves someone the United States has designated, the sovereignty question splits four ways.

Which list names the person. Which line of which annex, if any, forbids your supplier to comply. Who can excuse your supplier from that prohibition. And which court gives the designated person a remedy against the excusing.

The first has a URL. The second is blank for everything outside Cuba and Iran. The third is the Commission, on criteria that end with "any other relevant factor" and no time limit. The fourth is T-8/21, and the answer is the General Court, afterwards, on the lawfulness of a decision taken without hearing you. Ask them in that order and the fourth one is where the meeting gets short.

The Union's newer instrument does not fill the gap. Regulation (EU) 2023/2675, the anti-coercion instrument, applies where a third country applies or threatens a measure to prevent or obtain an act by the Union or a Member State. The Commission examines, the Council determines by qualified majority. It is a state-to-state instrument and it confers nothing on a person whose account has been closed.

• Executive Order 142036 February 2025

  Whose property is blocked, and who may not be paid or provided services.

• Regulation 2271/96, the Annexeight instruments, Cuba and Iran

  Whether a European firm is forbidden to obey a given foreign law at all.

• Regulation 2271/96, Article 5(2)Commission authorisation

  Whether one named firm may obey it anyway, in its own interest.

• Regulation 2023/2675anti-coercion instrument

  Whether the Union responds to coercion aimed at a Member State.

None of them asks what the designated person may do while the decision is being taken, or requires anyone to publish that it was taken.

What is not in the text

Article 7(a) obliges the Commission to inform Parliament and the Council of the effects of the listed laws and to "make regularly a full public report thereon". The most recent we could find is COM(2021) 535 of 3 September 2021, which EUR-Lex would not serve us in any format we tried. We found none since. We are not describing a document we could not open, which is why no figure from it appears above.

There is no published register of Article 5(2) authorisations. We looked. The only three anyone outside the process can name are the three a shareholder litigated into the public record, and they became nameable in 2023, five years after the first application procedure existed.

Article 9 leaves the penalty for breaching the prohibition to each Member State, requiring only that it be "effective, proportional and dissuasive". No floor, no register, no duty to tell anyone what was chosen. A prohibition whose price varies by Member State is a prohibition a group with subsidiaries can plan around, and planning around it is not a breach of anything.

And the remedy, when a European firm does comply, was measured in 2021. In Bank Melli (C-124/20) the Court held that Article 5(1) binds even where no American authority has issued any order, and that a national court may annul a termination made to comply — provided the annulment "does not entail disproportionate effects", having regard to "the probability that the person concerned may be exposed to economic loss, as well as the extent of that loss". The shield exists. It is then weighed against the size of the American market, by a judge, afterwards.

The Wall Street Journal reported on 22 September, according to Anadolu, that broader sanctions on the court are being prepared. If they arrive, the question will not be whether Europe has an instrument. It has had one since 1996, and adding a ninth line to the Annex is a delegated act, not a treaty. The question is what the first authorisation application under the second paragraph says, which bank files it, and whether anyone outside the Commission finds out it was granted before the twelve months are up.