Eugene Shvidler is a British multi-billionaire of Russian origin. He is a friend of Roman Abramovich, formerly of Chelsea Football Club’s fame, and until March 2022 used to sit on the board of Evraz, a UK-listed company with subsidiaries all over the world, including Russia. Despite being a British citizen, Shvidler is now sanctioned by the UK government. His property is therefore frozen, subject to any licence granted by the UK’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation to allow for his and his family’s reasonable expenses.
Such are the basic facts giving rise to the Supreme Court’s judgment in Shvidler v Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs [2025] UKSC 30, delivered on 29 July 2025. The Court’s majority (Lord Sales and Lady Rose, with whom Lord Reed and Lord Richards agreed) found the sanctions lawful. Lord Leggatt issued what is, in the words of Cambridge’s Professor Mark Elliott, ‘a striking, powerfully written dissent‘.
The pathos of Lord Leggatt’s speech is already attracting attention. A leading sanctions lawyer Michael O’Kane, of Peters & Peters in London, told the Law Society Gazette it was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘for the ages’. Edward Grange, of the law firm Corker Binning, called the dissent a ‘tour de force in rights-based judicial reasoning’. Jim Sturman KC echoed Lord Leggatt’s description of the UK government’s stance as ‘Orwellian’.
Given this early reception, Professor Elliott may not be wrong in suggesting that Lord Leggatt’s dissent might well become ‘the most enduring aspect of this case’. So, I wanted to unpack Lord Leggatt’s speech and discuss what it gets right; where I think it goes astray; and what it foreshadows for the future of challenges to UK sanctions.
Grounds for Sanctions
By way of a preliminary comment, the Supreme Court’s judgment also involved dismissing an appeal by Dalston Projects, a company that owns the Phi, a yacht impounded in London under UK sanctions. All judges agreed that the yacht was lawfully sanctioned, and so nothing needs to be said of it further.
Insofar as Shvidler’s appeal was concerned, his counsel did not appear to seriously contest that he fit the designation criteria under the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019. This was under two distinct provisions: first, Shvidler was ‘associated with a person, Roman Abramovich, who is involved in obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia’; and second, he was ‘working as a non-executive director of Evraz plc, an entity carrying on business in a sector of strategic significance to the Government of Russia, namely, the Russian extractives sector’.
It is worth pausing here. Neither of these grounds for designation involves any involvement, direct or indirect, in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, these criteria are extraordinarily broad. For example, they could ensnare anyone working for any major business with interests in Russia as of February 2022. Not everyone answering that description has in fact been sanctioned.
Lord Leggatt made the point with gusto (at [318]):
None of the other directors of Evraz plc was designated along with Mr Shvidler. (The two individuals who control the company in concert with Mr Abramovich, neither of whom is British, were subsequently designated in November 2022.) Nor, for example, according to Mr Shvidler’s uncontested evidence, has the government designated any current or former director of BP, another UK company which had interests in the Russian extractives sector when Russia invaded Ukraine. At that time, unlike Evraz plc, BP was heavily and profitably engaged in a joint venture with the Russian state-owned Rosneft Oil company, with two members on the board of Rosneft.
All of this is true, and speaks to several fundamental features of sanctions in all countries that resort to autonomous, non-UN-based sanctions:
- First, designation criteria are drawn up by governments themselves, typically based on laws authorising them to make sanctions regulations for one or more of highly abstract purposes, such as ‘to further a foreign policy objective of the government of the United Kingdom’ under section 2(d) of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018. No prizes for guessing whether regulations are going to be broadly drafted!
- Second, sanctions are always selective. There are invariably going to be more people who can, and probably should, be designated. This is true for the UK’s Russia sanctions; this is also true for any corruption or human rights sanctions regime (no shortage of crooks or human rights abusers around the world!); and pretty much any other sanctions programme.
Those features are problematic, but they are the price we pay for enabling governments to respond, in a flexible and agile fashion, to all manner of international emergencies. It would be disingenuous to suggest there are no rule-of-law trade-offs involved, but one also needs to recognise the benefits, including rapid multilateral sanctions against Russia in 2022; ‘Magnitsky’ sanctions regimes to target human rights and corruption; etc.
Still, in some countries, this set-up creates an intractable, systemic problem. If, in order to get off a sanctions list, the claimant needs to demonstrate that he or she does not match the designation criteria, winning is virtually impossible. Remember that the government writes (and, if necessary, re-writes!) the criteria. This is why challenging sanctions is so difficult in the US, whose Constitution extends no human rights protections to foreigners outside US territory, or Australia, which has no federal-level human rights protection.
By contrast, in the UK, the European Convention on Human Rights provides another layer of protection against sanctions. While all Supreme Court judges agreed that Shvidler matched the designation criteria under UK law, they differed on whether the resulting interference with his human rights was justified.
Sanctions Objectives
It is plain that sanctions encroach on the human rights of those targeted, including the right to property. In Shvidler’s case, the interference is particularly significant because he is a British citizen. Wherever his assets are located in the world, should he attempt to deal with them in violation of UK sanctions, he would be exposing himself to a risk of criminal liability under UK law. As Lord Leggatt notes, this is quite different from the position of a non-citizen who is sanctioned by the UK but holds the bulk of his wealth overseas and is not bound by UK law with regard to those assets.
Governments’ ability to sanction their own citizens is a largely under-appreciated feature of sanctions laws. It is, and should be, rarely exercised. Historically, its main use has been against suspected terrorists living outside their home country. In recent years, we have seen other examples, too, such as UK sanctions against Graham Phillips, a British-born Russian propagandist.
Once an interference with the claimant’s enjoyment of human rights has been established, the next step is to consider whether it is ‘rationally connected’ with the pursuit of a legitimate objective in the public interest. Supreme Court judges unanimously agreed that pressuring Russia to cease the invasion was such a legitimate objective, but the question of ‘rational connection’ is where Lord Leggatt parted ways with the majority’s analysis.
In dealing with this point, Lord Leggatt was highly critical of evidence provided by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to the effect that Shvidler’s designation would (1) send a signal to other wealthy Russian businesspeople about the sanctions risk to them posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; (2) disincentivise others from associating with Abramovich and other oligarchs; (3) incentivise Shvidler to oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more robustly; (4) and encourage Shvidler to put pressure on Abramovich to either distance himself from Putin or, alternatively, influence Putin to stop the invasion.
Of these, it is the FCDO’s stated hope that sanctions would cause Shvidler to speak up more loudly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that drew the ‘Orwellian’ rebuke from Lord Leggatt: ‘It implies that it is legitimate in a democracy for the executive to freeze a person’s assets in order to put pressure on that person to speak out in support of government policy.‘ ([322])
More fundamentally, though, Lord Leggatt professed himself unconvinced that any of the four stated objectives were likely to be achieved. In doing so, he described the FCDO’s reasoning as ‘inadequate and lacking credibility’ ([319]) and ‘no more than armchair theories’ ([307]).
This is where, to respond to a cliché with another cliché, Lord Leggatt seems to have lost the wood for the trees. In essence, the government’s case was that the UK’s sanctions regime was calculated to impose pressure on Russia by targeting its political, economic and military establishment, and even those merely associated with it. It was intentionally casting a very wide net.
This was recognised by the Supreme Court. In the words of the majority, ‘the effectiveness of a sanctions regime depends on the cumulative effect of the measures imposed under that regime. The imposition of sanctions in relation to Mr Shvidler contributes to that cumulative effect’ ([197]).
This I think is correct. Consider the following example. One of the other people sanctioned by the UK at the same time as Shvidler is Polina Kovaleva, the step-daughter of Russian foreign minister Lavrov exposed by journalists as living a very comfortable life in London while Russia was bombing Kyiv. If one asked the FCDO to explain why sanctions against Kovaleva, individually and specifically, should cause Lavrov to change his course of action, I suspect their account would not pass Lord Leggatt’s muster either. But, cumulatively, if Russian officials knew that their children would be unlikely to enjoy the comforts of life in the West post-invasion, that could be a big deal.
The UK’s Russia sanctions regime comprises literally thousands of such individual designations. They capture not only those at the core of Russia’s malign activity, but also those on the periphery: business associates, friends, family members, etc. The we-will-target-you-by-association aspect to the regime is a meaningful component of the effort to undermine and isolate Russia. One might object to its breadth on policy grounds, but I do not think that one can plausibly deny its ‘rational connection’ to the underlying policy objective.
For what it is worth, Lord Leggatt’s only comment on this crucial consideration was this: ‘I have had in mind the argument that the effectiveness of sanctions depends on their cumulative effect. Unless, however, a measure is rationally connected to the desired objective, it cannot add or contribute anything to any such cumulative impact.’ ([319]) That, with respect, is sophistry. The point is that, to glean whether an individual designation is ‘rationally connected’ to the objectives of a sanctions regime, it needs to be considered within the context of that regime as a whole, as the majority has done.
Way Forward
Although I think that Shvidler was correctly decided, we should not be blasé about the rule-of-law implications of sanctions. Ultimately, as I have written elsewhere, if a government wishes to sanction you (including, in many cases, your own government!), they can, with very few avenues for recourse. This is an unsettling proposition. If sanctions are used irresponsibly, as the US has recently done (again) in relation to the International Criminal Court, the risks increase.
Still, in the UK at least, there are opportunities for review. In Shvidler, the majority ruled that the interference with the claimant’s rights was not only rationally connected to the pursuit of a legitimate objective, but also proportionate. In doing so, it noted that Shvidler could apply for an OFSI licence to fund his and his family’s lifestyle ([212]) and that his children were able to continue their education in the US ([211]). While no other pertinent details were provided in the judgment about Shvidler’s personal circumstances, earlier reporting indicates that several wealthy Russian businessmen sanctioned by the UK were granted licences allowing the use of over £60,000 per month as basic living expenses (again, we simply do not know whether Shvidler’s position is at all similar).
In other cases, such as those where no plausible connection is discernible between an individual designation and the overall objectives of the sanctions regime, or where truly significant hardship results from a designation, one can expect (and hope for) different results.
Economic Crime Law 