The Office of Foreign Assets Control last week announced its second round of Hamas-related sanctions after the terror group’s killings in Israel earlier this month, designating more Hamas-linked officials and financial networks. The agency sanctioned people helping Hamas evade sanctions, their companies and other entities with ties to the group.
The U.S. should convince Japan, the Netherlands and other allies to restrict exports of lower-level chipmaking equipment to China to prevent Beijing from becoming the global leader in the "foundational" semiconductors those tools can produce, the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank said in a new report last week. The report warned that current restrictions on advanced equipment risks pushing China to instead dominate the foundational chip sector, which will increase the likelihood that those semiconductors will be incorporated in U.S. defense technologies and could help Chinese companies “climb the value chain in leading-edge nodes, whether through legitimate or illegitimate means.”
After years of asking for U.S. defense export control reform, Australia is hopeful that change is finally imminent, said Arthur Sinodinos, Australia’s former ambassador to the U.S. before leaving the role earlier this year. Sinodinos, who said he helped oversee the creation of the Australia-U.K.-U.S. (AUKUS) partnership, said he believes Congress will soon pass pending legislation to reduce technology sharing restrictions, and Australia is pushing for “as big an exemption as possible.”
The State and Commerce departments are frequently seeing illegal exports of controlled items, including technical data, by companies that aren’t classifying their products correctly and may not realize they need a license.
The Bureau of Industry and Security on Oct. 27 announced an immediate 90-day suspension of new export licenses for certain firearms, components and ammunition while it reviews its firearms policies to determine whether any permanent changes are “warranted.” During the next 90 days, the agency said it will not issue any new licenses for those exports to non-government end users worldwide, apart from Ukraine, Israel or a nation listed in Country Group A:1.
A group of European countries not in the EU aligned with two sanctions moves from the EU on Iran and one under the bloc's regime against the proliferation and use of chemical weapons, the European Council announced Oct. 26.
The U.K. amended two listings under its Russia sanctions regime, the Office of Foreign Sanctions Implementation announced. The entries for Veniamin Ivanovich Kondratyev, regional governor of Krasnodar territory, and Nikolai Fyodorovna Kondratyuk, member of the Federation Council of Russia, were updated to change the date of birth for Veniamin and to add an alias for Kondratyuk.
The U.N. Security Council and the U.K. sanctioned two people for their ties to military groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The designations target Bernard Maheshe Byamungu, brigadier general for the Congolese militia group M23, and Protogene Ruvugayimikore, commander of a special unit for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.
The U.S. should be doing more to sanction people responsible for the recent “wave of coups and violence” in West Africa and the Sahel, Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting this week. Cardin, committee chair, noted that five countries in the region have experienced coups since 2020 -- Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger -- and the U.S. should be holding parties in those nations responsible.
The U.S. is planning more actions, including sanctions, to try to cut Hamas off from the global financial system after the terrorist group’s killings in Israel earlier this month, said Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Nelson, speaking during a meeting of the multilateral Terrorist Financing Targeting Center this week in Saudi Arabia, said the U.S. has “much more work to do” to build on its initial response, which has so far included new designations (see 2310180003 and 2310160054) and a new advisory to provide banks with guidance on countering Hamas financing.