The Extraterritorial Sanctions Policy of the United States and the (Ab)Use of the US Dollar as a Jurisdictional Link

This research aims at analysing the extraterritorial reach of US unilateral sanctions and their consistency with international law rules on jurisdiction, paying particular attention to the clearing of US dollar-denominated transactions as a jurisdictional nexus. The article is structured in five parts. After a brief introduction, Section 2 provides a general overview of the international rules on jurisdiction, focussing on the links traditionally invoked by the United States to justify the extraterritorial application of its sanctions. Section 3 then describes the US legal framework for the imposition of sanctions, analysing in particular US primary and secondary sanctions with an extraterritorial reach. Section 4 focusses on the enforcement of US extraterritorial sanctions on the sole basis of the clearing in the United States of the underlying US dollar-denominated transactions. The last section concludes by underlining how, despite attempts to find viable alternatives, the dominant position of the US dollar in the world economy will afford the United States an unrivalled sanctioning power for a long time to come.