On June 30, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14312 (the “Syria EO”) terminating the U.S. comprehensive sanctions program targeting Syria, while also continuing to maintain and expand certain sanctions targeting former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and others associated with the former Syrian regime. In addition, the U.S. State Department revoked the designation of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (“HTS”) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (“FTO”) on July 8, 2025. OFAC has taken the following actions to implement…
On July 1, 2025, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) published the International Criminal Court-Related Sanctions Regulations to implement Executive Order (“EO”) 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”, issued on February 6, 2025. EO 14023 authorized sanctions on foreign persons engaged in certain efforts by the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) to target the United States and Israel. EO 14023 In EO 14203, President Trump finds that the ICC…
In less than two weeks, we have seen Syria go from one of the most heavily sanctioned countries on the planet to a country well on the road to establishing normal trade relations with the Western world. The latest flurry of developments started on May 13, 2025, when President Trump caught much of the world by surprise when he said in a speech in Riyadh: “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria…
On Friday, May 16, 2025, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (“SECO”) issued a joint Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU”) in regard to the United States and Switzerland’s commitment to collaborate and share information related to sanctions and enforcement which was signed on May 9, 2025. The notice is published on OFAC’s website here. The MOU provides that information sharing between the United States and…