ABSTRACT
Both the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN), the practice and the specific culture of decision-making in each unit, group or formation contributes to shaping the policy of targeting, as well as the degree of target impact. This is partly because of the static way in which the policy is designed, the institutional practices of decision-making, and guideline documents, and so on. In addition to the formal aspects of EU sanctions decision-making processes there are also informal elements that are likely to shape sanctions policy. During the last decade, both the EU Council and the EU Commission have been able to agree on a set of formal documents to guide the EU in its daily management of various sanctions programmes. These documents formulate the basis for the daily design of EU sanctions policies as well as contributing to synchronising the language for the establishment of various sanctions regimes.
