EU Parliament Study Proposes Ways to Use Frozen Russian Assets
The European Parliament released a new study this week about EU sanctions and frozen Russian assets, which examines the legal challenges and possible solutions for using those assets to aid Ukraine. The 108-page paper proposes "viable options for the use of these three asset types as reparations under EU and international law" and argues that the most likely path involves a reparations loan to Ukraine.
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"This could be achieved through carefully designated steps, allowing a qualified majority vote to prolong restrictive measures concerning immobilisation of [the Central Bank of Russia] assets, ensuring temporality and reversibility while connecting this instrument to existing reparations and compensation mechanisms that adjudicate upon Russia’s violations and its obligation to pay reparations or compensation," the study's abstract says. "At an international level, this paper argues that an EU Instrument can be justified in terms of central bank assets’ immunity by offering a new interpretation of the relationship between procedural rules on immunities and secondary rules on countermeasures."