Proponents of the bill hope it will increase the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions targeting human-rights-abusing regimes and Washington’s adversaries.
A Syrian defector is quietly doing his part to take on foreign dictatorships.
The House of Representatives yesterday passed a landmark bill, whose proponents hope will increase the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions targeting human-rights-abusing regimes and Washington’s adversaries.
The idea is simple, yet unexpected. With sanctions’ targets engaged in all manner of sophisticated activities to evade seizure of their assets by U.S. authorities, the Bassam Barabandi Rewards for Justice Act gives the ordinary people — drivers, assistants, etc. — who serve foreign authoritarian elites an incentive to tip off the U.S. government about their efforts to evade sanctions.
All of this, the bill’s namesake said in an interview with National Review, is intended to fix some intractable problems that blunt the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions.
“I know from Syria that every time the U.S. sanctions someone as a person or a company, they use it as saying, ‘look I’m loyal,’” said Bassam Barabandi, the former Syrian diplomat who set this bill in motion. “It’s become more of a loyalty, showing loyalty, they get more advantages from their country, the same in Iran, the same in Cuba, the same in North Korea, even China, and Russia.” Moreover, he said, perfecting the use of targeted sanctions can do away with the need for broader measures that might cause more economic harm in the long run.
Under the Trump administration, the United States levied a record-setting number of sanctions measures — almost 4,000 by some counts. But sanctions evasion is commonplace, and even more widespread than U.S. law-enforcement activity would suggest. Since the start of 2021 alone, the Department of Justice has charged Iranian citizens with conspiring to evade sanctions, and the Treasury Department has targeted a Mexico-based network of oil distribution that laundered products targeted by U.S. penalties against the Venezuelan government.
Some experts also worry that the Trump-era sanctions surge has prompted U.S. adversary governments to seek workarounds that will make these measures less effective in the long run. The Biden administration, taking these concerns seriously, has said that it is wrapping up a monthslong policy review that could result in sanctions rollbacks across many different areas.
The Barabandi bill, were it to win a Senate vote and signature by the president, could go a long way to making this tool of American statecraft far sharper than it currently is.
Barabandi was posted at Syria’s embassy in Washington at the start of the Syrian revolution, working secretly with the Syrian opposition to secure passports to critics of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Then, according to Representative Joe Wilson — the author of this legislation — Barabandi “lobbied the U.S. government with information on Syrian oligarchs close to Assad and their sanctions evasion practices.”
Barabandi described some of those practices: People associated with the regime often change their names, or put ownership of their companies in the names of family members to evade U.S. financial penalties. He says that similar practices are frequently employed by sanctions’ targets in other countries as well.
Barabandi and Wilson highlighted the need to provide precisely the right incentives for individuals close to the regime to take a similarly dramatic step.
“Bassam’s case highlighted the need to create a clear mechanism to incentivize individuals to come forward with this kind of vital information, and this bill would do just that by expanding the Rewards for Justice Program at the State Department,” said Wilson.
Since 1984, the Department of State has paid out $150 million to tipsters who provided information to apprehend terrorists or disrupt their activities, and some of the largest awards can reach $5 million. In recent years, it has turned its focus to cyberattacks, and State currently offers rewards as large as $10 million for actionable tips.
But Barabandi was told three years ago when he approached the Treasury Department with a proposal to expand this program that doing so would require a new legal justification — hence the proposal that Wilson authored in his name.
Like the current Rewards for Justice program, this one would dole out cash prizes to whistleblowers. Unlike the program, however, these people could be eligible to win a cut of the not insubstantial assets that could be seized as a result of their tips.
There are two specific outcomes with a direct bearing on his home country that Barabandi thinks could come to pass if the bill were to be enacted. For one, it could show where Assad and his inner circle put their money outside of Syria, and it’d also reveal how that money goes to Iranian companies and individuals working with Tehran.
“You incentivize hundreds of people around the sanctioned people: their driver, their secretary, their personal assistant, their bank manager, their partners,” he said. “There’s a lot of people around that circle, who are really poor people or they don’t have that good income.”
Turning them against dictators such as Assad might just be the thing that authoritarian elites most fear.