—but that's very controversial, and members of the European Parliament have repeatedly called on the EU to do so. Some countries feel very strongly that there should be a list. It has not been possible to reach an agreement on it.
I think that serious human rights violations are perhaps a good example of a use for targeted sanctions. Although I don't disagree with anything that has just been said by Mr. Drezner, when people talk about the efficacy of targeted sanctions, I often wonder exactly what they mean by that. It seems to me to be very rare that targeted sanctions ever actually identify what it is they're trying to achieve and what someone who is targeted by those sanctions has to do if he or she wishes to change behaviours and not be sanctioned anymore.
What one tends to see are very broad formulations like “In view of the situation in Zimbabwe” or “In view of the situation in Russia, we are imposing sanctions,” but there are never achievable, clear goalposts. I wonder whether or not this is intentional. It seems to me in those circumstances to be extremely difficult to say whether targeted sanctions have worked or not because it is just not measurable.
Of course it also depends on who is imposing the sanctions and whether the targets care or not. If the European Union freezes your assets and prevents travel, you're not going to care, other than perhaps by reputation or symbolically, if you don't hold assets in the European Union and you're not going to travel there. The same would be true, of course, in the case of Canada.
As a final example, the EU's Russia program does not include on its list President Putin or his very close allies. This highlights the point that targeted sanctions, like others, are of course highly political. Very often the criticism is made that the real targets of the sanctions tend to be the business classes, the middle classes, and not the real decision-makers who are actually responsible for policy.
Very often you see decisions to include people in lists that are not really based on their conduct, but rather on their association with a regime or their status. There are plenty of studies showing that these have sort of counterproductive effects, because if you freeze out or make life more difficult for those people but not their rulers, the politicians who actually do have control over policy in those entities, then how can you say in any meaningful sense that those sanctions are working?