Raab sanctions herald a more robust global Britain

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has announced the implementation of the UK’s first autonomous human rights sanctions regime, which gives the government the power to impose sanctions on those involved in human rights abuses across the world. It is a big moment for British foreign policy.

In a statement to the House of Commons today, Raab said:

“The first designations will cover those individuals involved in the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who disclosed the biggest known tax fraud in Russian history. The designations will also include those responsible for the brutal murder of the writer and journalists Jamal Khashoggi. They will include those who perpetrated the systematic and brutal violence against the Rohingya population in Myanmar. And they also include two organisations bearing responsibility for the enslavement, torture and murder that takes place in North Korea’s wretched gulags, in which it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of prisoners have perished over the last fifty years. And so with these first designations, Mr Speaker, this government, and I hope this House, and this country, makes it crystal clear to those who abuse their power to inflict unimaginable suffering: we will not look the other way, you cannot set foot in this country, and we will seize your blood-drenched ill-gotten gains if you try.”

The new regime comes as a result of the post-Brexit 2018 Sanctions Act, which allows the British government to have an independent sanctions regime for the first time in decades. It was inspired by the US Magnitsky Act, which is named after a lawyer murdered for exposing Russian corruption and targets individuals responsible for human rights violations.

While these sanctions could theoretically have been implemented through the EU sanctions regime, the reality of getting Germany and France to sign up to enhanced sanctions on Russian nationals would have been a slow and arduous process. Indeed, the EU appears to be getting softer on Russia. Last year, Emmanuel Macron tacitly supported Trump’s campaign to readmit Russia to the G8, and Merkel’s government is pushing ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany, despite US sanctions.

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, is said to have become a hardened Russia-sceptic in the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings, which occurred while he was foreign secretary.

Dominic Raab made a point in today’s speech of seeking cooperation on Russian sanctions from beyond Europe, telling MPs: “In practice, targeted sanctions are of course most effectively done through coordinated collective action, so we’ll be working closely with our Five Eyes partners, including in particular the United States and Canada, who already have Magnitsky-style legislation, and Australia which is considering similar legislation.”

The government has previously experimented with a Singaporean-style trade-at-all-costs approach to foreign policy, as seen in its attempt to accommodate Huawei despite security concerns, but ultimately landed in the familiar territory of defending the rules-based international system. On both Russia and China, the government has now clearly prioritised security alliances over trade, which has pushed British foreign policy away from the continent and much closer to its “Five Eyes” allies. Five Eyes is the intelligence-sharing arrangement that involves the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The FCO also seems eager to build ties with mid-sized Asian powers. In May, The Times reported that Downing Street is seeking to forge an alliance of the top ten democracies (D10), including South Korea and Japan, to create alternative suppliers to Huawei’s 5G technologies. It was a creative proposal by a government seeking to prove its post-Brexit “Global Britain” credentials.

Foreign Policy Magazine, usually prone to Brexit-bashing, hailed the idea as “a golden opportunity for London to put some meat on the bones of the still unproven ‘Global Britain’ concept”. It then encouraged the EU to follow Britain’s lead. This reflects a wider shift within the foreign policy establishments in Washington and Brussels, which are becoming more open to the notion of a post-Brexit “Global Britain”.

Ulrich Spech, a senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund, tweeted this morning that “the UK is moving towards the free-world approach.” Adding: “Post-Brexit UK will be seen as a geopolitical experiment by continental powers. It seems that London itself is currently experimenting with different approaches (value-free Singapore, Commonwealth, free world, European power).”

Ben Judah, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute who was until recently openly anti-Brexit, tweeted a thread yesterday in which he stated: “There is a Global Britain emerging but it is far closer to Thatcher or even Blair’s foreign policy than the Cameron-Osborne model. It is a reversion to the old ‘pocket superpower’ model: close to the US, strident on authoritarianism, building a linchpin role in alliances like Five Eyes.”