Background
Since 2004 the European Union has maintained a sanctions regime against Belarus targeting those responsible for human rights abuses, electoral fraud, and suppression of civil society. Following Belarus’s facilitation of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — Russian forces attacked from Belarusian territory — the Council significantly expanded the regime. In June 2022 the Council added twelve individuals and eight entities to the asset-freeze lists under Council Decision 2012/642/CFSP and Regulation (EC) No 765/2006, among them Belaruskali AAT (one of the world’s largest potash producers, accounting for roughly 20% of global potash exports), its Director-General Ivan Golovaty, and Belarusian Potash Company AAT (BPC), the exclusive export vehicle for Belaruskali’s output. The listings were renewed on the same grounds in February 2023.
The Council’s stated basis for all three listings was criterion (b) of Article 4(1) of Decision 2012/642: that the entities and individual were “benefiting from or supporting the Lukashenko regime.” For Belaruskali and BPC the Council relied on the companies’ role as a primary source of hard-currency revenue for the Belarusian State, their state-owned or state-controlled structure, and their monopoly or near-monopoly export rights. For Golovaty, the Council additionally cited his membership of the Council of the Republic of the National Assembly, his receipt of State prizes awarded personally by Lukashenko, and the suppression of Belaruskali workers who struck following the disputed August 2020 presidential election.
The three appellants separately challenged the listings before the General Court, arguing that the Council had failed to state adequate reasons, that the listing criterion was too vague to satisfy the principle of legal certainty, that the factual assessments were erroneous, and that the measures were disproportionate. By three judgments of 18 September 2024 (T‑528/22, T‑521/22, and T‑534/22) the General Court dismissed all three actions in their entirety. The appellants then brought the present appeals before the Court of Justice.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Justice, sitting as the Tenth Chamber, joined the three appeals for the purposes of judgment and dismissed them. On the obligation to state reasons, the Court confirmed that the acts at issue set out actual and specific grounds — the appellants’ economic role, ownership structure, monopoly rights, dividend flows to the Belarusian State, and, for Belaruskali and Golovaty, the repression of striking workers — sufficient to allow the appellants to understand the basis for their inclusion and to challenge it effectively. The Council was not required to distinguish in its reasons between facts going to “support” and those going to “benefit,” as the same factual matrix could be indicative of both limbs of criterion (b).
On legal certainty, the Court upheld the General Court’s ruling that the phrase “Lukashenko regime” and the concepts of “benefiting from” and “supporting” that regime were sufficiently clear when read in their ordinary meaning, in light of the legislative history of the Belarus sanctions framework, and in the context of the objective of increasing pressure on the regime by widening the circle of targeted persons. The appellants’ objections to these terms went, in reality, to the Council’s application of the criteria rather than to their lawfulness. On proportionality, the Court affirmed that the appellants had not produced specific evidence to substantiate claims of excessive harm, and that the measures were consistent with the overriding objective of halting Belarus’s complicity in the aggression against Ukraine.
As to the substantive assessments, the Court confirmed the General Court’s factual findings: Belaruskali paid more than BYN 46 million in dividends to the State for the first half of 2019 alone and generated net profits exceeding BYN 4.797 billion in that year under a heavily State-controlled regulatory environment; BPC, 90% owned by Belarusian public entities, enabled Belaruskali to realise those export revenues and earned approximately USD 1.4 billion in fertiliser exports in the first seven months of 2020; and Golovaty, as Director-General since 2014 and member of the National Assembly, was both a beneficiary of and an active participant in sustaining the regime’s economic and political structures.
Key Takeaways
- State-owned enterprises that serve as major hard-currency earners for an authoritarian government can be listed as “benefiting from and supporting” that regime without the Council needing to show direct political complicity; generating and channelling revenue to the State is sufficient.
- The listing criteria — “Lukashenko regime,” “support,” “benefit” — satisfy the EU principle of legal certainty despite their breadth; their meaning is ascertainable from ordinary language, legislative context, and the overarching purpose of the sanctions framework.
- A single statement of reasons may simultaneously satisfy both the “support” and “benefit” limbs of criterion (b); the Council need not partition its evidence between the two concepts if the same facts are capable of establishing both.
- Sanctions extending to an exporting subsidiary of a targeted company (BPC as the “exporting arm” of Belaruskali) are lawful where the subsidiary’s activities are the mechanism through which the parent generates regime-supporting revenues and where lifting the restriction would allow circumvention of the primary measure.
Why It Matters
This judgment consolidates and clarifies the legal standards governing EU restrictive measures against Belarus across the post-2022 expanded framework. By affirming that large, economically significant state enterprises — even those without a direct role in human rights abuses — fall squarely within the “benefiting from or supporting the regime” criterion, the Court endorses a broad economic-pressure model of sanctions targeting. Practitioners advising clients with commercial links to Belarus or similar authoritarian economies will need to assess not merely political exposure but also whether revenue flows or preferential regulatory treatment from a sanctioned government could independently trigger designation.
The ruling also reinforces the durability of the Council’s Belarus listings against legal challenge: challenges rooted in the alleged imprecision of listing criteria will be recharacterised as disputes about application rather than legality, and proportionality arguments unsupported by concrete evidence of disproportionate harm will fail. With EU Belarus sanctions now spanning potash, financial services, transport, and energy sectors, this decision signals that the CJEU will grant the Council substantial deference in defining the perimeter of an economic sanctions regime tied to an ongoing armed conflict.