Freedom of Speech Punished Harder Than Crime | Dr. Juan Branco (Lawyer of Nathalie Yamb)

## Introduction The European Union’s sanctions machinery is no longer merely a tool of geopolitics; it has become a mechanism that can freeze lives, muzzle speech, and substitute administrative fiat for judicial process. The conversation with Dr. Juan Branco, counsel to Nathalie Yamb, lays bare a practice in which extrajudicial blacklists, asset freezes and travel bans perform penalties that often exceed the severity and procedural safeguards of ordinary criminal justice. What began as targeted measures aimed at geopolitical actors has metastasized into a regime that can, with minimal public evidence and no prior hearing, sever individuals from their livelihoods and families. This is not only a legal problem but a democratic and human-rights crisis: the blurring of diplomacy and punishment risks normalizing the idea that dissent or association can be administratively excised without meaningful adjudication. ## How are you looking at the EU sanctions? The discussion frames EU sanctions as an apparatus that has moved from economic pressure on states and sanctioned entities to the regulation of individual expression and association. Dr. Branco recounts the case of Nathalie Yamb, an African intellectual who criticized entrenched neo-colonial influence and accepted invitations to speak abroad. For that expression, EU measures froze her assets, banned her from EU airspace, and effectively trapped her outside her country—actions taken on administrative grounds and justified by tenuous links to external actors. The point here is not merely that sanctions were imposed, but that they were activated in a context where the principal “offense” was speech and political association, and where the evidentiary basis relies heavily on open-source citations, press articles and think-tank commentary rather than on corroborated judicial findings. Beyond Yamb, the exchange points to other individuals in similar straits: Europeans stuck inside the Schengen area, prevented from returning home; people whose commercial interactions are preemptively curtailed by cautious banks and businesses fearful of secondary liability. The practical effect is to convert an administrative list into a social and economic isolation mechanism. Institutions, fearing extraterritorial penalties or reputational damage, cut ties reflexively. The sanctions have thus become punitive in the lived sense, even when presented as diplomatic instruments. ## How do you make sense of this regime? Parsing the regime requires appreciating both its procedural architecture and its political logic. Procedurally, the EU’s sanctions framework is structured around decisions by the Council of the European Union—an executive, political body—that then delegates to judicial review only after the fact. The system is premised on the idea that surprise and immediacy are sometimes required for effectiveness. In practice, however, that logic opens a hole in rights protection: the absence of a prior contradictory procedure (a hearing, a right to respond before punishment) is defended by pointing to the availability of ex post judicial review—and yet such review is formal, slow, and limited in scope. Politically, the regime operates in the fog of contemporary security discourse. The language of “hybrid warfare,” influence operations and disinformation has become capacious enough to capture expressions that would once have been squarely within the protections of free speech. Anything from a tweet to a speech at a conference can be recharacterized as a hostile act if it suits political aims. The evidentiary files underpinning sanctions decisions—what the Council calls the “documentary basis”—are often recycled media reports and think-tank posts that echo each other. When these fragments are treated as decisive, the result is adjudication by aggregation: a person is judged on a dossier of public commentary rather than on tested facts. This legal-amphibian status—part diplomacy, part punitive measure—allows member states to export foreign policy choices into the everyday rights of people. The result is a sanction culture that, if replicated globally, threatens to make international life brittle: companies adopt hyper-cautious compliance postures; academic exchanges and political debates become risk-laden; and the notion that someone’s fate can be sealed by administrative decree gains legitimacy. ## How can we use law to fight against such blatant injustices and miscarriage of legal order? The conversation foregrounds a litigation strategy that seeks not only to overturn individual sanctions but to expose structural defects. Lawyers challenging these measures must do several things at once: demand clearer reasoning, require a demonstrable link between conduct and the harms cited, and insist on meaningful access to the evidence relied upon. That means litigating the opacity of the “documentary basis,” pushing courts to treat hearsay and recycled commentary with skepticism, and insisting that administrative actors bear the burden of proof when fundamental rights are at stake. Another legal lever is to force the Council to justify the proportionality of measures. Freezing a person’s assets and forbidding their return to home territory are severe, liberty- and livelihood-altering steps. Proportionality review—long a staple of constitutional and human-rights adjudication—can be marshaled to test whether such measures are necessary and the least restrictive means to achieve legitimate aims. Where an administrative decision rests on a crude or circular evidentiary claim, proportionality can expose arbitrariness. Finally, the law can be used to contest the very institutional allocation of power. Challengers can argue that the Council’s exercise of quasi-judicial punishment without judicial safeguards infringes rights protected under EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Strategic litigation should not only seek remedies for individuals but also press courts to set doctrinal limits on the Council’s competence to impose extrajudicial sanctions that function as durable punishments. ## Could the European Court of Justice be used to invalidate the entire practice? The European judicial organs are a double-edged sword. On one hand, the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) are the formal venues for review; they can and do annul decisions when procedural errors or clear abuses are exposed. On the other hand, the courts have been cautious. Historically, they have deferred to the political organs on foreign policy and national-security grounds, treating sanctions as a component of sovereign international action beyond robust judicial policing. The transcript highlights how the courts frequently deem sanctions matters as falling within the Council’s discretion, and when they do find violations, the Council often re-lists individuals on slightly reformulated grounds, thereby neutralizing judicial victories. That said, litigation at the CJEU remains a necessary frontline. Successful arguments can carve out doctrinal space: insisting on a stronger standard of evidence, securing more transparent access to the documentary basis, and obtaining interim relief that recognizes the urgency of asset freezes and travel bans. The courts, if pushed, could articulate clearer requirements for proportionality and procedural fairness in the sanctions context. But for the CJEU to produce systemic change, litigants must persist: the court’s jurisprudence evolves through repeated, high-quality appeals that expose the regime’s systemic deficiencies. Realistically, invalidating the entire sanctions practice would be improbable absent political reform. Courts are reluctant to usurp foreign-policy prerogatives; they are more likely to refine and constrain the practice than to abolish it. Thus, litigation should aim for incremental wins that strengthen procedural guarantees and make the regime less arbitrary and mo

Freedom of Speech Punished Harder Than Crime | Juan Branco (Lawyer of Nathalie Yamb) Can a blacklist replace a court? Can a travel ban turn Europe into a cage? I sit down with Dr. Juan Branco, French-Spanish lawyer and activist who advised Julian Assange and now defends Nathalie Yamb, to trace EU sanctions from asset freezes to speech policing. -- Sorry for the choppy connection. The recording had issues. Links: Juan Branco on X: https://x.com/anatolium Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies- shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:56 How are you looking at the EU sanctions? 00:05:02 How do you make sense of this regime? 00:15:59 How can we use law to fight against such blatant injustices and miscarriage of legal order? 00:31:46 Could the European Court of Justice be used to invalidate the entire practice? 00:37:02 What's your plan of action for the short term? 00:41:06 Outro #Pascal Welcome back, everybody. This is Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies, and today I’m joined by Dr. Juan Branco. Juan Branco is a French and Spanish lawyer and activist who, among other people, advised Julian Assange during his trials, and he’s currently advising my compatriot, Nathalie Jamp, about the EU sanctions regime. Today we want to discuss, again, the sanctions—what they mean for the people who are under the regime, and what they tell us about the rule of law in Europe. Juan, welcome. #Juan Branco Thank you very much, Pascal, for the invitation. #Pascal Thank you for taking the time for this. You’ve been one of the people who’s time and again stood up and used the law, as a practicing lawyer, as far as I understand, to help people who are being persecuted—for lack of a better word. Can you tell me how you look at the EU sanctions against individuals, both inside and outside the EU? #Juan Branco -- 1 of 12 -- Yes, we've had a fascinating case with Nathalie Yamb, who, as I recall, is an intellectual—an African intellectual, a Swiss-Cameroonian—who has been denouncing for more than 20 years the persistence of France-Afrique, which is the interconnection between French interests and elites that prey on African resources on the continent. She’s been very consistent in this political endeavor. A few years ago, she gave a very famous speech in Sochi, in which she again denounced this system of power and declared that Africa would remain independent, whatever the cost, but that they would welcome any kind of allies, including Russia, if those allies respected them and treated them as equals. And this unleashed, from the French authorities under Emmanuel Macron’s rule, a fury against Nathalie Yamb. They immediately targeted her as the main person to destroy and used her as a justification for the failure of their policies in Africa. This led to a series of legal measures, including an *interdiction d’entrée sur le territoire français*—she was banned from entering French territory. A few years later, just a few months ago, came a decision from the European Union banning her from entering or even flying over EU territory, and of course, seizing all her assets. The only link they ended up finding between Nathalie and Russia was the fact that she participated in a conference in Berlin where several European and German MPs were also present. And this conference was apparently financed by an NGO, which was itself financed by armed groups called Wagner. So they used this very small, tiny—not even a link, but a connection at some point— which didn’t bring any kind of resources to Nathalie, because she wasn’t paid to participate in this conference, to justify these extraordinarily violent measures. These measures were not taken following any kind of judicial standard or anything we normally relate to the rule of law. For example, there was no contradictory process beforehand, because they considered that the surprise effect was critical—which one could understand if we were talking about the seizure of assets, especially those of big corporations in the military world or of oligarchs. We could understand that, maybe, because of course money can move very fast. But first, regarding an intellectual who has done nothing other than use her freedom of speech, and even more importantly, an intellectual who is being targeted with physical measures—physical restraint measures—because she cannot return to her home country. That’s actually the novelty of this case. The novelty is twofold: first, the fact that she cannot return to Switzerland, because Switzerland is enclosed within the European Union. And this, I think, is something the European authorities had not foreseen or understood would become a huge legal issue. And second, that she’s being targeted only for her words, not because she has any direct or indirect interest in the war in Ukraine or in any structures of power close to Vladimir Putin, for example. #Pascal May I ask you, though—we have several such cases by now. A second one is the former Swiss Colonel Jacques Beau, who was actually in Brussels and is now also stuck there. Because if you’re on the sanctions list, you’re forbidden from traveling across member state borders. We also have a -- 2 of 12 -- German national, Hussein Dogru, inside Germany. So how do you make sense of this regime? And do you think it will stand over the long term? Will it remain possible to treat people like this? #Juan Branco Yes, so we welcome Jacques Beau joining us in this struggle, even though it wasn’t completely voluntary on his part, because he brought more visibility to these kinds of measures, which had been more or less accepted until then. I have to say that the Swiss authorities did not implement the sanctions against Nathalie Youn, quite clearly because they made no sense. Until a few years ago, it was almost automatic—Switzerland would immediately implement whatever EU sanction was taken against an individual in relation to Russia. But they’ve slowly started to distance themselves and haven’t provided any kind of assistance. I have to say, it’s been quite embarrassing, because Nathalie Youn was in a foreign country when she learned about the sanctions. So she was stuck there with no means to find solutions for her survival, simply because her assets were frozen at the same time she was banned from traveling. And you have to understand that these sanctions go way beyond just the ability to return to your country. For example, any company that has activities in the EU will preemptively stop having any kind of economic interaction with you to protect itself from potential sanctions. I don't think these... I mean, there are several options. Either this system becomes generalized— since we know the originators of these kinds of structures were the United States, with their sanctions and ban lists—or, if we keep imitating them as we have, and other countries start imitating us, we’ll soon have a world that’s not functional. Every country will have its own sanctions list, and any company, for example, will be afraid to trade with X or Y because, in some country, that person is sanctioned. And thus, if you start trading with that person, you might eventually find yourself sanctioned. I mean, this happened, for example, to a French bank, BNP Paribas, a few years ago. They faced billions in sanctions from the U.S. because they had continued doing business with an Iranian company. And since they were trading in dollars in their other activities, they were liable under U.S. jurisdiction and had to pay one of the biggest fines ever imposed in such cases. So we know that this is, structurally, an abuse of power—the way these instruments are constructed. I'm talking now in general terms. I mean, in individual terms, it's extraordinarily violent because, as I was saying, there is no warning and no possibility to deliberate the decision before it’s taken. So then you can go, as we did, to the European tribunal and the general courts, which took four months just to decide whether it was an urgent case or not—and they decided it wasn’t. So this is very interesting: if seizing all the assets of someone and blocking that person from returning to their own country is not considered an urgent -- 3 of 12 -- issue for a court, then what is an urgent issue? If you look a bit more broadly, at the jurisprudence of the General Court and then of the Court of Justice of the European Union, you realize that the lifting of sanctions is almost nonexistent. You have maybe around ten examples out of thousands of sanctioned people, and all these proceedings were opened to try to lift them. The European courts do not consider this a matter under their jurisdiction. They see it as part of the exercise of a sovereign’s natural power in its international relations, so they don’t treat it as a human rights or individual rights issue—when it clearly is. They only have very limited control over very small elements, for example, in cases of clear abuse, like when there’s confusion over a name and two people are mixed up. Then, eventually, you can have some kind of review. And the most ironic part is that when you have a control, most often the European Union and the Council of the European Union decide to impose new sanctions on slightly different grounds, even before the previous ones have been lifted. So the person targeted has to start again with the whole judicial process, which can take up to two or three years if you include the appeal time—making it, in practice, a void system of law and an impossibility to challenge it factually. #Pascal And we have such cases, right, where individuals actually won their case at the European Court of Justice, and they were simply relisted almost immediately with a modified justification. Then the whole thing started again, and they're still being sanctioned. #Juan Branco I know only a couple of cases where this didn’t happen, and ironically, it was the son of an oligarch, for example, who managed to avoid the system of simply reinstating sanctions once they’d been lifted by a tribunal. That’s something I’ve argued before the court—that you can’t pretend there’s judicial control, because, of course, they have this tautological argument where they say it’s fine for sanctions not to have a prior contradictory phase since there’s supposed to be judicial control afterward. And then you tell them there’s no actual judicial control, you know. So we end up in this argument where we’re actually challenging even the legitimacy of the court and the exercise of its prerogative. So, of course, it becomes very tough and intense. The exchanges we've had are sometimes harsher with the court and even with the concept of the European Union, because we're basically—yes, we're basically challenging the raison d'être of this judicial review and trying to push them to their limits, to make them understand that it's a system where there’s no possibility to win if you’re behaving like a normal person. And on the other hand, we’re trying to bring them these new elements from this -- 4 of 12 -- specific case, which, as you said, Jadubo has followed, but it’s really the first time that just because you spoke or wrote something, you can face legal sanctions that are actually much heavier than most sentences, even in criminal cases. If you look at the average sanction you receive from a criminal case in Europe, it’s much lighter— most often shorter in time and with less effect, because most of them are without execution. You get this kind of symbolic conviction, but you don’t actually go to jail or anything like that. Here, you have an actual, factual sanction, with the inhibition of your capacity to survive as an economic person, and the inability to return to your family, your work, your place of residence. That’s the first thing. And th