On Friday 20 April 2018, the College of Europe in Natolin hosted a special panel on sanctions entitled: "The Design, Imposition and Impacts of EU Sanctions: Practitioner's and Scholarly Perspectives".
The imposition of international sanctions has become a regular feature in the foreign policy of the European Union (EU), which implements restrictions mandated by the United Nations and agrees autonomous measures. The sanctions rounds imposed against Syria, Russia, North Korea, Iran or South Sudan have attracted a great deal of attention by the European public. Yet, little is known about the design, purposes and operation of sanctions, particularly in comparison with other tools of foreign policy.
The talk shed light on the employment and implementation of sanctions by the EU from the vantage point of a practitioner, Mr Joachim KNODT, a RELEX Counsellor who has been responsible for sanction issues at the Permanent Representation of Germany to the EU for several years. His insights were contrasted with the scholarly knowledge produced in the field by Dr Clara PORTELA, a scholar specialised in the study of sanctions in international relations.
Dr Clara PORTELA is a former Visiting Professor at Natolin. She holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and an MA from the Free University of Berlin. She is currently a faculty member at the University of Valencia, having previously served in a similar role in Singapore. She received the THESEUS Award for Promising Research on European Integration in 2011 for her book European Union Sanctions and Foreign Policy (2010). Dr PORTELA was a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Natolin (2015-17), at University of Innsbruck (2014-15), at the Institute d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble (2013) and at the Université Grenoble-Alpes (2017). She is an expert on international sanctions, she has participated in consultative processes convened by the United Nations, the European External Action Service, the European Parliament, the European Commission, the UK House of Lords, the UK Foreign Office, and the Asia-Europe Meeting, among others.
Mr Joachim KNODT is Natolin Alumnus (Montesquieu Promotion 2004-2005). He joined the German Federal Foreign Office in 2011 and serves currently as RELEX Counsellor at the German Permanent Representation to the EU. Prior to becoming a diplomat, he worked for the Google Policy Team, for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and for the Roland Berger Foundation. Previously, he was a Carlo-Schmid Fellow at the OSCE in Sarajevo and assisted at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.