Death By Sanctions: EU Destroys German Journalist in Germany | Hüseyin Doğru

## Introduction What begins as a policy instrument aimed at foreign coercion has quietly become a mechanism of domestic control. The conversation about recent EU sanctions, as reflected in the exchange with Hüseyin Doğru and others, points to a disturbing transformation: measures originally designed to punish external actors are now being applied inside the Union to silence dissent, restrict livelihoods, and reconfigure who counts as a political subject. The result is not merely a new set of diplomatic penalties but a repressive architecture that substitutes administrative fiat for judicial due process, turning citizens into “non-persons” through paperwork, banking freezes, and bureaucratic gatekeeping. ## Sanctions as an Extrajudicial Tool The most striking theme to emerge from the discussion is the extrajudicial character of the EU’s sanctioning process. Unlike criminal proceedings, sanctions are decided in political fora without court hearings or the ordinary procedural safeguards of justice: no formal charges, no public evidence review, and no immediate right to legal defense. The mechanism is collective and opaque—foreign ministers agree to lists; member states implement them. That concentration of power, wielded without the checks typically associated with deprivation of rights, effectively creates an administrative death sentence for targeted individuals. Doğru’s account sharpens this picture. He describes how the labeling of his activities as “disinformation” and “platforming terrorist organizations” was not adjudicated by a judge but declared within a political package alongside dozens of other names. Even more revealing is the strategic manipulation of formal categories—citizenship was represented in the sanctions database in a way that appears to strip him of rights to challenge the measure. Presenting an EU national as a non‑EU national removes the legal obligation for a proper judicial hearing, thereby converting a political decision into an unreviewable administrative fact. Whether termed institutional malpractice or calculated legalism, the effect is the same: sanctions bypass ordinary constitutional protections. This mode of governance resists simple partisan framing. It is a technocratic form of repression, reliant on databases, legal exceptions, and intergovernmental decision-making. Once operationalized, it is brutally efficient: frozen bank accounts, travel restrictions, denial of work and income, and the daily labor of obtaining permission for the most routine transactions. The sanctioning state does not merely punish; it administers a prolonged, precarious existence that saps resources, dignity, and the capacity to litigate the punishment itself. ## Humanitarian Relief and State Control What passes for humanitarian relief in this system is itself a vector of control. The bureaucratic mechanism that allows a sanctioned person limited access to funds—small monthly allowances disbursed only after repeated justifications to state agencies—turns relief into leverage. In Doğru’s case, a meager amount from frozen benefits is what the authorities acknowledge as eligible spending, while everything else requires case-by-case approvals whose timing and outcome are unpredictable. This conditionality exposes a paradox: the state becomes both punisher and provider. It can freeze assets and then determine whether the sanctioned individual lives or plunges into destitution by deciding whether a particular expense is “urgent.” That discretionary power is not neutral. It cultivates dependency and surveillance: every request for money requires scrutiny; every allowance becomes a data point that can justify further restrictions. Families, too, feel the squeeze—spouses’ accounts frozen, children impacted, and everyday needs subject to permission. The sanction, in other words, holistically restructures a household’s economic life and social autonomy. The bureaucracy’s slowness is part of its punitive logic. Authorities can act swiftly to add one’s name to a list, yet take months to clarify whether a sanctioned person may work or to approve an essential purchase. This temporal asymmetry—rapid exclusion, slow remediation—creates a state of ongoing insecurity. Moreover, while the state maintains that legal remedies exist at the EU level, the financial and procedural barriers to accessing justice are prohibitive. Facing legal fees in the hundreds of thousands to bring a challenge before the European Court of Justice, many will find the right to a hearing illusory. ## The Weaponization of "Disinformation" The invocation of “disinformation” is the rhetorical instrument that legitimizes sanctions in the eyes of publics and institutions. Labeling journalistic activities as propaganda or as providing a platform for terrorist organizations allows authorities to reframe critical reporting and dissent as security threats. This semantic shift undermines basic press freedoms: interviews, coverage of protests, and reporting on contentious geopolitical issues are recast as harmful speech that benefits a foreign adversary, thereby truncating the normative space for contested truth. Doğru’s experience highlights how ordinary journalistic practices—speaking to all sides in a conflict, covering university occupations, or reporting on domestic unrest—can be reframed as aiding a hostile foreign policy actor. The claim is not that the reporting directly causes violence, but that it somehow benefits another state’s strategic position. That logic allows the state to conflate internal political dissent with external subversion, and to treat independent media outlets as instruments rather than interlocutors. The chilling effect is immediate: journalists self-censor, activists retreat from visible protest, and civic conversation narrows as the risk calculus of public engagement shifts. This weaponization of the term “disinformation” also has performative consequences. It signals to social institutions—banks, employers, platforms—that association with a named individual is reputationally and legally dangerous. The label becomes an administrative scarlet letter, prompting pre-emptive exclusion by non-state actors who prefer compliance to contestation. In this sense, the stigma of disinformation extends the reach of sanctions beyond legal penalties to social ostracism and professional immobility. ## Recommendations for Collective Action If sanctions have been repurposed into tools of domestic repression, responses must be collective, strategic, and rights-based. First, legal defense must be accessible. Member states and civil society should fund legal aid specifically for sanctioned individuals to ensure meaningful access to EU courts. Challenging the procedural architecture that allows political lists to foreclose judicial review is essential; strategic litigation that targets the procedural deficiencies—lack of notice, inadequate reasons, and barriers to appeal—can reclaim judicial oversight. Second, transparency mechanisms are crucial. Sanctions decisions should be accompanied by clear, evidence-based reasoning and by avenues for independent verification. That means public disclosure, redacted when necessary for legitimate security concerns, but not wholesale secrecy that prevents any contestation. A transparent registry of how humanitarian approvals are decided, and on what timeline, would reduce arbitrary discretionary power. Third, financial safeguards must be instituted to prevent social collapse. Temporary emergency funds administered by independent bodies (not the same ministries that implement sanctions) can prevent families from being driven into destitution while preserving the punitive purpose of targeted measures. Such funds would be conditional not on bureaucratic whims but on basic human needs, assessed through standardized criteria and subject to judicial review. Fourth, professional solidarity and institutional pushback are essential. Journali

EU Persecutes Citizens In Germany. Death By Sanctions The European Union has started using the Anti-Russia sanctions as a repressive tool to smuther civil society dissent within the West. Last week, Colonel Jacque Baud, a former Swiss army member and NATO advisor was sanctioned, but so were several others before him, including activists and Journalists. One of them is Hüsseyin Dogru, a german national who was sanctioned already in May. He joines us today to discuss his case. Links: X (Twitter): https://x.com/hussedogru Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall. com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:03 The Sanctioning of an EU Citizen 00:05:10 Sanctions as an Extrajudicial Tool 00:10:33 The Brutality of Being a "Non-Person" 00:15:20 Humanitarian Relief and State Control 00:21:50 Repression as a Tool of Social Control 00:32:53 The Weaponization of "Disinformation" 00:38:00 Challenging the EU Court of Justice 00:47:51 Recommendations for Collective Action #Pascal The European Union has started using the anti-Russia sanctions as a repressive tool to smother civil society dissent within the West. Last week, Colonel Jacques Beau, a former Swiss Army member and NATO advisor, was sanctioned. But so were several others before him, including activists and journalists. One of them is Hüseyin Doğru, a German national who was sanctioned back in May. He joins us today to discuss his case. Hüseyin, welcome. #Hüseyin Doğru Hello, nice to meet you. #Pascal Nice meeting you too, and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. Your case was one of the first in the early packages where the European Union started sanctioning EU citizens. I think you were among the first three, and if my information is correct, you were actually the first who, at the time, lived inside the EU and still does. Can you tell us a little about what happened, when it happened, and what that meant for you? #Hüseyin Doğru -- 1 of 17 -- First of all, thank you for having me here and giving me this platform to talk about my case, because it's not common these days for people to discuss this issue from a critical perspective. So, what happened? I was sanctioned on the 20th of May 2025 by the European Union for being, apparently in their eyes, a Russian disinformation actor. That was justified—or rather explained—through my pro-Palestinian, anti-genocidal news coverage with my media outlet at the time, Red Media, and also for highlighting the complicity of the European Union, and especially, since I live in Germany, the complicity of the German government in this genocide. And that was categorized as disinformation. It was categorized as giving terrorist organizations a platform. It was categorized as creating social discord in society. The explanation for that—because people say, “But one has nothing to do with the other”—yes, that’s true. But the explanation from the European Union in their sanctioning package, and the 17 anti-Russian sanctions, is that by giving terrorist organizations—referring to my interviews with Palestinian parties and militant groups, which are part of a war—and I need to talk to every side in a war. That’s journalism, to be objective. That was categorized as offering a platform and propaganda for terrorist organizations. The second topic was that I covered the news about a university occupation in Hamburg. There was this very famous Humboldt University occupation, I think almost two years ago—maybe a year and a half ago—where students occupied the university to show their solidarity and protest against the German government's complicity. That was also categorized as giving terrorist symbols a platform, spreading terrorist symbols, and creating social discord. And the third point was that, by covering social and violent protests within the EU, I would destabilize the unity of the European Union and its member states. So this is the explanation. And the Russia part comes in here because they say that by covering it, only Russia would benefit from it. So it’s not the people who benefit from exercising their right to information, or my right to freedom of the press and freedom of opinion, which are granted here within the EU. They say, no, this is something that benefits a foreign enemy country. Therefore, it’s disinformation. And that happened on the 20th of May, 2025, when suddenly, from one day to the next, I became—like one of your guests before, I think it was the BSW MEP who said—you become an outlaw. #Pascal Yeah. Michel van der Schoenboek pointed out that you’ve basically lost most of your rights to a normal life inside the EU. And, of course, living in the EU, that’s extremely impactful. I just want to underscore the accusations against you—and it is “accusations,” because you weren’t found guilty in any court of justice. You’re not, to my knowledge, under any kind of criminal investigation, are you? I mean, there’s not even a… Is there any court case going on against you, actually? #Hüseyin Doğru -- 2 of 17 -- So, you have to understand that sanctions are extrajudicial. There’s no court, no hearing, no right to defense, no right to a lawyer—nothing. The foreign ministers of the EU countries come together; they have a pile of papers with lots of names and information, which they don’t really read, I guess, and they just decide, “Okay, let’s agree to that entire package.” And within that package was my name as well. That was offered by governments, or by a politician, or whomever—we think it was the German government. And you don’t have that right. But with me, by law, by European law, you should have the right to defend yourself and to a proper court hearing, defense, everything, before you get punished for something. But in my case, they did something very interesting. And I need to be very careful now with the words I choose, because everything I say is considered disinformation at the moment and can be used to sanction me again. So that’s why I’m saying we think, or we assume, that the German government and the European Union sanctioned me as a Turkish citizen, even though I’m German. They said, “Hüseyin Doğru is a Turkish citizen, so we sanction him.” Why did they do that? A European Union citizen has the right to a hearing—it’s a fundamental right. They have to give you the chance for a court process. But a non-European citizen does not have these rights. So they would have said, “OK, Mr. Erdoğan is a Turkish citizen—sanctioned.” So it was completely extrajudicial. #Pascal And I just need to add, if you go to it, the European Union provides a sanction tracker, which is also a database with an API, so everybody can interlink—and you can be blocked from everything. But let's put that aside. On that sanction tracker, you are listed with nationality: Turkey. Just “Turkey.” Hüseyin Doğru, Turkey. To the point that actually Sevim Dağdelen had to reach out to me and tell me, “Pascal, by the way, you said he was a Turkish national because you thought he was, based on this listing.” She had to correct me and say, “No, he’s a German national as well.” So that’s very duplicitous. That’s so sneaky. #Hüseyin Doğru A lot of people say, “Oh, that must be a mistake.” I said, “No, this is not a mistake.” There are two elements to that. I think one is institutional racism—if you’re an individual without European citizenship, it means you have no rights in the European Union. You technically have no right to a judicial process. That’s the message; that’s why they chose that. And the second layer, I think, is to extend the boundaries of what is legal and what can be done on the illegal side. Because sanctions are illegal—they violate all fundamental European and member state constitutions and basic human rights. Even though the European Union says on its website that it’s aligned with international human rights, I suggest that every European Union foreign minister should live just one week under sanctions—then they would understand how “humanitarian” that is. So there are two layers: the -- 3 of 17 -- racism layer, and also the one about pushing the boundaries—what can we do, and what can society accept? How far can we go to extend this oppressive mechanism in the European Union? I think the effect it has is also a scaring effect—it makes sure people are scared. They make sure people think, “Oh, that could happen to me too,” because it really can happen to anyone right now. I mean, with the new sanctions that came into effect on—I think it was the 15th or 16th of December—especially with Jacques Bourg, it’s even scarier than my case. Because with him, they basically said, “We don’t like your opinion.” With me, they tried to make it sound a little bit logical, in a nonsense way, but with him they were very open: “We don’t like your opinion.” So there are several reasons why they’re doing that, and unfortunately, it’s working right now. #Pascal I mean, it is working in the sense that it really scares a lot of people. It already has—some people on X said, “I’m not going to report on Ukraine anymore.” So this one is working. And it makes life for you, I suppose, very, very difficult. Can you give us an idea of how horrible this is? #Hüseyin Doğru Yeah. A sanctioned person is a non-person—as Yanis Varoufakis said, a non-existent person. You don’t exist anymore, especially in my case, which is a precedent because I’m a living person within the European Union, the first one who got sanctioned. You don’t have—like everyone thinks—you don’t have a bank account. You can’t travel anymore. I’m not allowed to travel, not allowed to leave the country. But they say I can enter the country, because as a European citizen they have to accept me again. You don’t have bank accounts, but it goes further. It's like, I'm not allowed to work anymore. I'm not even allowed to receive money from my wife. Technically, or in theory, I'm not even allowed to eat the groceries my wife buys for the house. I'm not allowed to do that because it could be categorized as an economic benefit for me. My lawyer said to me, "Hüseyin, be very careful if you go out with someone for a coffee or a meal, or if someone wants to give you a gift to support you, because the punishment is severe. You can go to jail for that." You or that person? Both sides—because it’s considered circumventing the sanctions. #Pascal You’d be punished for trying to circumvent the sanctions. I mean, there’s an additional penalty if you try to do something like that. #Hüseyin Doğru You could, in theory, go to jail for that. So that’s one side. And the effect is that you get isolated because people are scared of you—of what happened to you. On a daily, personal level, by -- 4 of 17 -- sanctioning me, they’ve technically sanctioned my family as well: my two newborn twins, my six- year-old child, and my wife, because it affects their daily life too. Our income is non-existent. The assets of my wife, who has nothing to do with this, are frozen as well—her bank accounts, her savings. And my children are affected by that. I’m not allowed to pay my rent. I’m not allowed to pay my lawyer. I’m not allowed to do anything. But I still get letters from the government telling me to pay my taxes. So when it comes to taxes, you have to pay them in Germany—that’s very serious— but you’re not allowed to have any income. #Pascal I mean, the German state receiving money from you wouldn’t count as aiding a sanctioned person, but anyone else receiving money from you—anybody else—is illegal. They cannot receive your money. #Hüseyin Doğru Receiving any kind of monetary transaction is not allowed for me—except from the state. Except from the country that does this. Except from the state, yes. Except from the state. I need to clarify something here. What the state says—or the German Federal Bank, as well as BAFA, the Ministr