Thirty years of doing nothing

A law should be judged by what it does, not by what it says. On 22 November 1996 the European Union adopted Council Regulation 2271/96, the Blocking Statute, which turns thirty next month. It forbids European companies and citizens to obey a list of American laws on Cuba and Iran that Washington applies abroad. Its key article is blunt: no person it covers "shall comply". Measured by its words, it is a declaration of sovereignty. Measured by its effects, it has done almost nothing for thirty years.

The statute leaves penalties to each member state. Public fines are so rare that no official tally exists. The best-known case is Austria's: in 2007 the bank BAWAG closed the accounts of about a hundred Cuban clients before its sale to an American fund. Vienna opened proceedings. The dispute ended with BAWAG asking the US Treasury for a licence to reopen the accounts, and Washington granted it. A European law was satisfied by American permission.

In January 2026 Berlin answered a parliamentary question on how many companies in Germany had been hit by the American measures the statute is meant to block. Its answer was one sentence: the federal government has no figures. It gave a similar answer in 2015. A state that wanted its law to work would at least count.

The European Court of Justice first ruled on the statute only in 2021, 25 years after its adoption. Telekom Deutschland had cancelled its contracts with an Iranian bank on the American blacklist. The court held that obeying the listed US sanctions is forbidden even without an order from Washington. It also held that a court forcing the company to keep the contracts must weigh the losses this would cause. About half the group's turnover is American. Even the court that upheld the law accepted that obeying it has a price.

When the US left the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, Total, Siemens, Allianz and Maersk said within ten days that they would wind down or leave their Iran business. Maersk's chief executive put it simply: "you can't do business in Iran if you also have business in the US". Brussels adopted an update to the statute less than a month later. INSTEX, a payment channel set up by France, Germany and Britain, completed one transaction before it was wound up in 2023, its owners blaming Iranian obstruction.

The problem is not Cuba, and not even Iran. Since December 2023 any foreign bank, European banks included, can lose its American correspondent accounts, and with them its main route to the dollar, for significant business with Russia's military industry. Europe sanctions Russia itself and shares that aim. In March 2025 the US sanctioned a Chinese refinery for buying Iranian oil. On 9 October 2026 it sanctioned the International Criminal Court itself. The point is not the aim but the reach: who decides what a European company may do. As far as I can find, the statute's list has not changed since 2018. On the criminal court, a Commission spokesperson says only that the statute "still remains on the table", with no date for using it.

Cuba shows the pattern most clearly. In May 2026 Washington threatened foreign firms and banks dealing with the Cuban conglomerate GAESA with secondary sanctions, which punish outsiders for trading with a US target. Within weeks Meliá and Iberostar, two of Spain's largest hotel groups, stopped running 27 Cuban hotels between them. Neither officially named American pressure. I have found no public reaction from Madrid or Brussels. The new American rules are not even on the statute's list. The shield was not lowered. Nobody raised it.

The reason is the dollar. It still makes up well over half of the world's central bank reserves and roughly half or more of international payments. A bank that crosses Washington pays dearly: in 2014 France's BNP Paribas agreed to pay almost nine billion dollars over business with Sudan, Iran and Cuba. So governments keep the law on the books and let companies comply quietly. This is the mechanism: moral language takes the place of action, and the existence of a law takes the place of its use. We Europeans pay a real price, not only Cubans or Iranians: in lost markets, in fines paid to another country's treasury, in customers whose accounts are closed for the wrong passport. The statute forbids our companies to comply, then leaves them in practice to carry the American risk. A Union that gives itself the power to protect its own people and declines to use it is not neutral. Quietly and by habit, it betrays its own citizens and its own market.

Australians may think this is a European problem. It is not. Australia, too, is a member of the International Criminal Court, and its banks, too, need the dollar. Any country in that position faces the same pressure, with or without a law against it.

I was born in Cuba and live in Germany. I am against the American embargo, and I am against a Cuban government that holds political prisoners and has failed its people. Neither excuses the other. Havana should free every political prisoner. Washington should lift the measures that hit ordinary Cubans, including the rule of 30 September that withdrew the general permission for US banks to keep accounts for Cuba's private entrepreneurs, the very people Washington says it supports. But this essay is about Brussels and Berlin, and about a promise made in 1996.

Europe has three honest options. It can enforce its own law: update the list, publish every case, and back companies that refuse foreign orders. It can build what makes enforcement credible: payment systems and a euro strong enough that compliance is not the only rational choice. Or it can repeal the statute and admit that its foreign policy is written elsewhere. What it should not do is spend another thirty years telling a story about sovereignty while doing nothing.