The hypocrisy of Raab’s selective sanctions

Will the new wave of sanctions on foreign human rights abusers, announced by Dominic Raab this week, work? While much of the coverage focused on the fact that, for the first time, London was acting unilaterally, rather than as part of a European or wider initiative, the actual measures – controls on entry to the country to them and their money – are pretty familiar.

So, too, are the targets. In the first wave (we are promised more) are 49 ‘individuals and organisations involved in some of the most notorious human rights violations and abuses in recent years‘, from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and North Korea. They are deemed responsible for, respectively, the death of Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky during an industrial-scale fraud in 2009, the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, persecution of the Rohingya minority, and Kim Jong-Un’s forced labour camps.

Fair enough, and none of us should be shedding tears for any of these monsters.