Lecture by Manuel Sánchez Miranda

On 10 February 2026 at the ICLRC library, Manuel Sánchez Miranda—founding partner of De Minimis Law (Geneva), Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies’ Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, and a member of the WTO Roster of Legal Experts pursuant to Article 27.2 of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding—delivered a lecture titled “When Sanctions Become Weapons: The Relationship between WTO Law and General International Law in the Governance of Economic Sanctions.” The event was moderated by Aleksei Petrenko, the ICLRC's Senior Researcher in Public International Law.

The international law governing economic sanctions presents various challenges to states, decision-makers, and the international community at large. It is scarce, incomplete, and undergoing development. Partly due to this inadequate governance framework, states have launched so-called “sanctions programmes” under which domestic authorities administer and enforce economic and trade sanctions unilaterally, sometimes in contravention of international law.

This lecture examined the sources and implications of this inadequacy. Through legal analysis of a sample of measures characterised as “trade weapons”, it demonstrates that the major contributing factors stem from the incompleteness of the regime complex governing economic sanctions, as well as from the misalignment between the World Trade Organization and general international law and its institutions in matters of collective security.