“Reduced to Zero”

One case that deserves special attention is that of German journalist Hüseyin Doğru. Since the EU placed him on a sanctions list in May 2025, he has had no access to his accounts and is not allowed to travel. Doğru lives in Berlin and is much more affected by the sanctions than others. “You can’t even buy me a coffee,” says Doğru during an interview in Berlin. “In theory, I’m not even allowed to help myself to anything in the fridge after my wife went shopping.” The German Bundesbank, which is in charge of enforcing sanctions, granted him an exemption to withdraw a minimum subsistence allowance of €506 a month  from his bank account. And even this tiny sum was temporarily blocked by his bank. “I can’t feed my newborn babies,” says Doğru. “On an existential level, you’re reduced to zero.”

Doğru was editor in chief of the portal red., which specializes in anti-colonial perspectives. Red. has ceased operations due to the sanctions. Doğru’s case is unique because of the official reason for his punishment: his is the only entry in the sanctions regime RUSDA, which punishes alleged support for Russia, that refers to coverage of the Middle East conflict. Doğru, his company AFA Medya, and the website red. allegedly supported Russian attempts to “undermine or threaten stability and security in the [European] Union” by supporting “violent demonstrations” and “systematically spreading false information.” The EU accuses Doğru of maintaining “close financial and organisational connections with Russian state propaganda entities.” The EU claims that Doğru “shares deep structural ties, including interlinkages between, and rotation of, individual personnel with Russian state media organisations.”

The allegedly “violent” demonstration refers to the occupation of Humboldt University in Berlin by pro-Palestinian activists in 2024. Because Doğru reported on the occupation on his website, he is said to have created a platform for the “rioters” to spread the ideology and symbols of terrorist groups such as Hamas. Does reporting on protests against the German government or its allies constitute an exercise of a fundamental right in a democracy or political subversion on behalf of a hostile power? For the EU, it’s the latter.

The sanctions were preceded by a series of articles in German newspapers that sought to prove Doğru’s political proximity to and financing by the Russian government. Doğru seems to have found himself in journalists’ crosshairs due to his extensive reporting on the war in Gaza and the repression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany. One of the journalists is still hounding Doğru, sending press requests to organizers of panels that he has spoken at to make sure he does not get paid in contravention of the sanctions.

Doğru firmly rejects the EU’s accusations. “Red. has never received financial support from Russia or Russian broadcasters,” he emphasizes. The outlet was partially financed from his savings, Doğru says, but mainly from donations. There were, however, indirect links to Russian media. Before founding red., Doğru worked for Redfish, which produced video content and documentaries for the video agency Ruptly, a subsidiary of RT. The EU classifies RT as a propaganda tool and has blocked it in Europe. But is it illegal to have worked for a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a channel that was legal at the time? RT and Ruptly experienced a staff exodus after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Redfish ceased operations. Doğru then founded red. Some of its employees had previously worked at Redfish. Doğru emphasizes that Ruptly and RT never exercised any control over content at Redfish. Redfish also produced videos that took a critical look at Russian politics, such as the Kashmir conflict and antiwar protests following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Working with Ruptly, Doğru says, was simply an opportunity to produce left-wing journalism that otherwise would have been difficult to finance.

According to Doğru, the reporting on the Humboldt occupation was normal journalistic practice. “Our sources informed us in advance about an upcoming political intervention,” so he reported on his exclusive access, as any journalist would do. “Apparently, the state was bothered by our critical reporting on the repression of pro-Palestinian activists here in Germany.”

Chilling Effect

Doğru’s case raises serious questions about freedom of expression in Europe. Who decides what constitutes acceptable journalism and what constitutes propaganda that must be suppressed? What exactly is disinformation — is it simply a different interpretation of facts? Can opinions be sanctioned as disinformation? The EU is making an example of Doğru. It’s a warning: if journalists report in a way we don’t like, we can destroy your lives. The chilling effect is already having an impact: Doğru has received little (public) solidarity from left-wing politicians, journalists, or the media. Some left-wing publications refused to report on the case at all; Doğru is too tainted by the accusations of being pro-Putin. The few attempts to help Doğru have been blocked. German newspaper Junge Welt wanted to give Doğru a job but was informed by the Bundesbank that that would constitute prohibited economic aid. To date, despite repeated inquiries by his lawyer, Doğru has not gotten a concrete answer as to whether he is allowed to work.

“Journalists are being deprived of their professional and material existence through sanctions or debanking; that is an attack on freedom of the press and freedom of expression,” says Ezra Abendrot, a spokesperson for Rote Hilfe. “The fact that Hüseyin Doğru is listed in EU sanctions demonstrates how far-reaching and arbitrary these instruments can be.” Rote Hilfe itself has fallen victim to such sanctions. Last fall, a local bank blocked the organization’s accounts. The expansion of sanctions lists and measures such as debanking should be “seen in the context of escalating authoritarianism and persecution of political dissent,” according to Abendrot. Like in other areas of repression, the Kurdish movement was an early victim of such measures in Germany. In 2015, for example, a local bank closed a donation account for Rojava.

Anyone trying to understand this ever-expanding sanctions apparatus will come across London-based law professor Eva Nanopoulos’s work. She is concerned that sanctions today rarely draw scrutiny. When the system was greatly expanded by the EU in the wake of 9/11 as part of the “war on terror,” there was still a lot of criticism of these executive measures, which lacked due legislative process and were not subject to criminal proceedings. Today, Nanopoulos says, sanctions are “far more draconian,” but criticism has almost died down. “We seem to have simply accepted the claim that certain forms of terrorism require extraordinary measures,” she says.

Sanctions have long been considered a gentler alternative to military intervention. Nanopoulos considers this narrative of “smart sanctions,” which supposedly target specific individuals and spare the general population, a liberal myth. Such instruments are not humanitarian innovations of the 1990s but were developed earlier by the United States in the context of the Cold War and the “war on drugs.” According to some estimates, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which were purported to only target the leadership, led to the deaths of around 500,000 children, mainly due to the blockade of medicines. However, Nanopoulos also calls for a fundamental debate on sanctions: “We should not judge sanctions as good or bad based on their effect. We need to have a fundamental discussion about the kind of exercise of power we are witnessing here.”

Defenseless

Over the last few years, the system has ballooned. The EU alone maintains thirty-three sanction regimes affecting almost six thousand individuals, organizations, and governments. These sanctions include measures such as arms embargoes, travel restrictions, and economic and financial blockades against actors from specific countries such as Belarus or Iran but also transnational regimes, including sanctions packages aimed at preventing the proliferation of chemical weapons or terrorist organizations. The sanctions regime related to the war in Ukraine accounts for the most cases by far. The number of new organizations sanctioned each year has exploded since the early 2000s, from only about a hundred cases to several hundred new entries per year — even over a thousand in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now sanctions are increasingly affecting EU citizens. “We’re witnessing the classic imperial boomerang,” says Nanopoulos. “What we introduced to take action against others is now coming back to haunt us.”

In Doğru’s telling, sanctions are a Kafkaesque system. “There is no court, no trial, no defense, no charges, no evidence. You have to figure out how to get out of it yourself.” In theory, you have thirty days after the sanctions package is enacted to lodge an appeal with the EU Council of Ministers. However, Doğru only received a letter informing him of the sanctions weeks after they came into force — and it was sent to the address of a coworking space in Istanbul used by AFA Medya as an office, rather than to his Berlin home. Moreover, the letter contained fundamental factual errors: Doğru is listed as a Turkish citizen, even though he has been a German citizen since his naturalization. Doğru’s lawyer was at least able to get his wife’s accounts (she is not on the list herself) unblocked. He was also granted access to the files, so that Doğru now at least knows exactly what he is accused of. Yet he is not allowed to publish this information.

Even if everything goes by the book, it’s still not easy to defend oneself. Sanctions lists are created in a highly opaque process: national governments propose names to the EU Council of Ministers, which then decides on sanctions measures. Prior national prosecution is not required. This is because sanctions do not address criminal offenses but political misdeeds. The documents on which the decisions are based and the minutes of the Council of Ministers meetings at which the decisions are made are classified as confidential, often in the name of alleged security interests. This means that they cannot be accessed by the public or those affected and their lawyers. “It’s actually quite clever to use such lists to circumvent the principles of the rule of law that would otherwise apply in one’s own country,” says Nanopoulos. It seems unlikely that this system is legal. An expert opinion commissioned by the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in the European Parliament and written by Ninon Colneric, a former judge at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, concluded last fall that sanctions such as those imposed on Doğru violate both EU and international law, particularly because the accusation of disinformation is so vague. In particular, denying the right to a hearing before sanctions are imposed appears both disproportionate and unlawful.

How Europeans would counter American sanctions is even less clear. In 1996, the EU enacted a so-called blocking statute, which is intended to prevent the extraterritorial effect of US law on European soil. Updates in 2018 and 2021 explicitly prohibit European organizations and companies from implementing laws that harm European citizens. “But today, there seems to be little will in European politics to implement [the EU’s] own laws to protect its own citizens,” notes Nanopoulos. Rote Hilfe has had some success at this level: a regional court ruled that German and European law apply, and not the political decisions of an “authoritarian foreign government.” This means Rote Hilfe’s accounts remain open, for the time being.

However, legal means alone will not be enough to overcome this system, notes Ezra Abendrot of Rote Hilfe. Authoritarian measures are a political problem and need to be combated politically. But resistance to the sanctions system is not looking good. At the beginning of February, the German Bundestag implemented an EU directive aimed at harmonizing the implementation of sanctions at the national level. With the amendment, violations of sanctions officially become criminal offenses. The new law amounts to a massive tightening of the rules. Only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) voted against it, while the Greens and the Left abstained.

While the West increasingly resorts to sanctions, or war, in the name of resisting other states’ alleged authoritarianism, within its own borders it is also building up a set of instruments that undermine the rule of law and the guarantees that come with it. Ironically, in the name of defending freedom, liberal democracies are producing the same authoritarian practices that they claim to be fighting elsewhere.