ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the empirical analysis of the restrictive measures of the European Union, showing both the salience of the EU in the sanctions world and the significance of the experience accumulated by Brussels to enhance the understanding of the success of sanctions. It focuses on the experience of the EU since 1992, and presents the sanctioning record of the Council in comparative perspective. It then includes narratives of a few case studies, to verify whether the current analytical tools are sufficiently elaborate to capture the complexity and the variety of conditions that characterize sanctions episodes. The adoption of restrictive measures in recent years has been a constant feature of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) actions, but the debate has not been particularly rich. Financial restrictions can take several forms, such as seizing of bank accounts, prohibition of financial transactions and denying loans to central banks of targeted countries.
