“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote in his powerful 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. While this wisdom might be commonly accepted today, there is a substantial matter in which it is not.
What started as a moral imperative to put the clamps on Russia’s war chest after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has now morphed into a strain on Europe’s rule-of-law credentials. Hasty asset freezes — often based on open-source suspicions rather than forensic proof — have prompted a deluge of litigation, clogging courts and yielding embarrassing climbdowns.
Since 2022, the EU has lost more than a dozen sanction-related appeals, with judges repeatedly faulting vague rationales, such as simply a “pro-Kremlin” label. The practice of governments confiscating first and justifying later is eroding public faith. Investors from the Middle East to Asia may now eye Europe warily, fearing arbitrary expropriation.
From that perspective, the discontinuation last week by German prosecutors of an inquiry into Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov over alleged sanction law violations can be viewed as a good sign. The probe dragged on for more than three years on allegations of breaching German foreign trade law and apparently yielded no results. Two investigations, one regarding alleged payments for frozen property in Bavaria, and the other regarding an alleged failure to declare personal items to the German export control office, were later merged into one that was finished on 30 December 2025. Usmanov’s lawyers insisted he had no links to the companies involved in the alleged payments nor did he own or control the properties in question. They contested that EU sanctions were not applicable to the case. The German state received a €10 million voluntary payment from Usmanov to finish the probe, with a portion of those funds allocated to charitable organisations.
To settle an inquiry without charges is a rather common practice under German procedural rules. However, the investigations against Usmanov were from the start branded as a sanction-related “treasure hunt”, and what has been reported by some local media outlets leaves a deep impression that they were indeed masterminded as part of a broader campaign against Russia.
If that is true, the discontinuation of the probe sees like a face-saving shift for prosecutors who would have preferred to press charges in court if their case had any clear prospects. For Usmanov, the settlement was an opportunity to finish the probe immediately, maintaining his innocence, and given the fact that there are no procedural limits on its duration.
Underlying this is a stark picture of judicial pushback. In a similar episode, in 2024, Frankfurt prosecutors dropped their money-laundering inquiry against Usmanov after a comparable €4 million settlement. That inquiry also yielded no results and was closed with no recognition of guilt. The closure was preceded by a German court decision to overturn search orders on a number of properties that investigators had linked to the billionaire. Another court decision demanded that the investigators return seized items to their owners.
Meanwhile, on the media front, Usmanov’s representatives, led by German lawyer and writer Joachim Steinhöfel, have racked up more than a dozen court wins across Europe, securing defamation injunctions against outlets such as Forbes, Tagesspiegel and Kurier. Those publications had falsely attributed sanctioned assets to him and linked him to the Russian government. Courts prohibited statements about Usmanov supposedly controlling implicated property. They stopped baseless media claims, compelled retractions and imposed fines.
Usmanov, himself a trained lawyer, has wielded EU law to dismantle false narratives — in particular, against unfounded guilt by association — with an irony that Western justice, long a global beacon, is being schooled in legality by those it was intfinished to punish.
This is part of a broader trfinish of sanction-related reversals. Russian bankers Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman had sanctions annulled by the EU General Court in 2024. The court held that the EU failed to sufficiently substantiate any evidence of their ties to Putin. Sanctions against them remain in force, however, but others have been luckier. The Russian businessman Vladimir Rashevsky won his appeal at the EU General Court and was delisted from EU sanctions. These cases reveal that the sanction machine is vulnerable to appeals.
This leads us to two conclusions. One is that we live in an age of modern segregation, where people are treated differently becaapply of their citizenship or the countest of origin of their wealth. No solid factual proof is requireded to impose restrictions or initiate a criminal investigation, just a strong conviction that the individual can be assigned to a group of politically designated individuals. Had there been any solid evidence, the much-publicised probes against Usmanov would have started long before 2022. The same can be stated about numerous other cases where individuals remain under restrictions becaapply of false media reports or for mere association with richer, sanctioned relatives.
The second conclusion is that the EU judicial system, including national courts and law enforcement agencies, is capable of correcting past political arbitrariness. Some individuals who won their appeals have already been delisted. Their finances were unfrozen, and their travel bans lifted. Some others were delisted under administrative procedures, even if the EU legislation gives the Council of the EU almost unlimited powers for maintaining restrictions. Court decisions over false media reports, that were employed to sanction wealthy persons, give more power to their appeals in EU courts. When a sanction-motivated investigation yields no results and is abandoned – even if that requires a compromise – it gives hope to other individuals who have been arbitrarily accapplyd.
All this leads to believe that Mr King would have found some room for optimism in battling against discrimination today. What is uncertain, however, is whether the foundations of European law, in the long run, will bear the strain of a continent teetering towards politically motivated injustice.
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