Working Paper 62: Corruption sanctions: What governments need to know
Basel Institute on Governance
How can governments respond to serious corruption when those responsible are beyond the reach of the law? Some governments have turned to corruption sanctions to address this issue.
This Working Paper examines how corruption sanctions – tools that allow governments to impose asset freezes and travel bans on individuals suspected of corruption without any finding of guilt in a court – have evolved over the past decade, and offers recommendations for their more effective and legitimate use.
Advantages and limitations of corruption sanctions
Corruption sanctions emerged primarily to address situations where notoriously corrupt individuals enjoy impunity within their own legal systems. Their key strengths lie in their flexibility and versatility:
- they can be applied regardless of any geographical link between the sanctioning state and the alleged corruption, based on relatively low evidentiary thresholds; and
- they can serve a wide range of objectives – from disrupting and deterring corrupt activity to condemning corruption, facilitating asset recovery and signalling support for another country’s law enforcement efforts.
However, the paper also highlights important limitations. Corruption sanctions are often wielded without a clear post-imposition strategy. And: their inherent flexibility comes with due process trade-offs, including broad governmental discretion and limited judicial oversight.
Recommendations
Drawing on an extensive analysis of the experiences of key jurisdictions – including the US, UK, EU, Canada and Australia – the author puts forward nine recommendations for governments on how to design and maintain credible and effective corruption sanctions regimes. These include publishing clear criteria for high-priority targets, strengthening transparency around licensing and delisting decisions, and exploring sanctions against professional enablers in major financial centres.
The paper is aimed primarily at policymakers but will also be of interest to anti-corruption activists, private-sector financial crime specialists and academics.
About this paper
This paper is published as part of the Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper series, ISSN: 2624-9650. It is a Diamond Open Access publication, also hosted on the Basel University Library’s open publishing platform eterna as part of our Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Journal, with DOI: 10.12685/bigwp.2026.62.1-57.
You may share or republish it under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International Licence.
This is a publication of the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) at the Basel Institute on Governance. ICAR receives core funding from the Governments of Jersey, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the UK.
The contents are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Basel Institute on Governance, its donors and partners, or the University of Basel.