The ECJ and the restrictive measures adopted within the CFSP area: taking fundamental rights seriously?

The so-called ‘targeted’ or ‘smart sanctions’ are one of the newest tools that the international community, including the EU, have developed in order to better address threats to international peace and security, such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or the violation of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Such restrictive measures are in many cases the result of a set of controversial political ideas comprising a major involvement of the executive branches and a strong reliance on intelligence and security information, with the goal of catching the addressee of the sanctions by surprise. This peculiar character of the target sanction regimes makes it so that achieving international security may appear to increasingly conflict with the respect of fundamental rights of those individuals, groups or entities who are subject of such restrictive measures. This naturally makes a judicial review extremely important. The topic of this dissertation relates to how this conflict is faced by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) when reviewing the restrictive measures adopted by the Council of the EU within the CFSP area, a field where the ECJ has limited competences. Is the ECJ taking the claims of violations of fundamental rights in sanctions-related cases seriously enough? Are fundamental rights of paramount importance for the ECJ, or are they merely an interest as another, ready to be trumped by the need to achieve international security at all costs? In order to answer to such question, an original analysis of thirty-tree judgements has been conducted, highlighting the most recurrent pleas raised by the applicants and tracking the evolution of the ECJ’s standpoint relatively to each of the rights allegedly violated.