Sanctions Explorer is a project. A source of all current and historical sanctions across all major sanctioning authorities

About the Project

Sanctions Explorer is a project initiated by a collaboration between Archer, a former Berkeley-based nonprofit using tech to improve human rights and human security, and C4ADS, a nonprofit dedicated to providing data-driven, evidence-based research on global conflict and transnational security issues. The current iteration of Sanctions Explorer was developed fully by C4ADS Data and Technology team, and is meant to be a comprehensive source of all current and historical sanctions data across all major sanctioning authorities.
Sanctions Explorer is designed to put sanctions data at your fingertips.
Sanctions are a crucial part of the way that the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and various other nations and organizations protect national and international interests and ensure peace and security. Yet they remain understudied because of limitations on accessing and exploiting hard data. The online interfaces for the SDN list, EU sanctions list, and UN sanctions list are difficult to search, provide very little functionality, and often do not report historical sanctions information. At the same time, they are not designed to “talk to” one another – different spellings and formats are common, making a comprehensive analysis of the global sanctions architecture difficult.

A thorough, up to date knowledge of sanctions is crucial for government professionals, compliance professionals, and sanctions lawyers. At the same time, academics and policymakers need a long-term view comparing sanctions over time. With Sanctions Explorer, we provide simple views for data on both of these questions:

Search

• Access the Search page to quickly discover current and formerly sanctioned entities across all three major sanctioning authorities. Interested only in sanctioned Russians whose names start with A? You can also create custom search parameters to more quickly find the information you need, then export that information in a structured format.

Analytics

• Looking for bigger picture insights? Use the Analytics page to see trends over time, such as how many SDNTK designations were added (or removed) between 1994 and 2020.

Engagement

• Is there a feature you wish this page had? Reach out through the feedback form to get in touch!

FEATURES

Automated Data ingest

Sanctions Explorer persistently monitors the UN, EU, and OFAC websites for updates to the sanctions lists and publishes the new data to the website as it goes active. The home page shows the time of the most recent update of the sanctions database. This process also enables us to collect and store historical data for entities which had been removed from the public lists and serve them in this platform.

MORE ROBUST SEARCH

Want to find all sanctions related to North Korea? What about all entities that were once sanctioned in Colombia, but have now been de-listed? How about changes over time? Entities sanctioned by the US but NOT the EU?
With fuzzy/inexact matching, items that might have previously gone unfound will no longer slip through the cracks. Our search is forgiving of typos and alternate spellings or transliterations.

We also provide a number of additional filters, especially in regards to location (nationality, citizenship, place of birth, etc), sanctions program, and listed/de-listed status. There are also filters to find all entities who are linked to a country ("Related to Country") as well as a date-of-sanction filter.

Analytics

Sanctions Explorer aggregates all current and former sanctions and presents this information in aggregate on the analytics page. Apply filters to explore trends in sanctions regimes over time, or hit play and watch the geographical concentration of sanctions over time.

ADDITIONAL DATA

There is official Treasury data that is not available through the OFAC website, including the reliability of information (e.g. confirmed vs reported) as well as the sanction date and legal basis.
Additionally, sanctions authorities have begun including some non-Latin aliases (mostly in Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic). Though these are not searchable, they are freely available on SanctionsExplorer. Note that currently a small number of entities have non-Latin names.

AND MORE!

We are continually looking to improve and build on Sanctions Explorer. If you'd like to see a feature added or report a bug, please fill out our feedback form!

METHODOLOGY

Sanctions Explorer derives its data from the following four sources:

• Historical OFAC Data
• Current OFAC Data
• EU Data
• UN Data

For the historical OFAC data, we spent significant time and effort parsing the information out programmatically. The archive includes historical OFAC data from 1994 to the present, though the formatting of the data varies widely across those years.

For the current UN, EU, and OFAC data, Sanctions Explorer scans those sites every 24 hours to check for updates to the XML or CSV files that host the sanctions information.

If there is an update to the file, the Sanctions Explorer backend will download that file, extract all information, and run a change detection algorithm to only capture data that is different from the previous release. The system then reconciles entities that have been modified, merging the changes with existing entities based on their name, document number, date of birth, or other unique signifiers if applicable. This process ensures that all updates are captured and connected to the relevant entry so that no duplicates exist.

Source

Sanctions Explorer https://sanctionsexplorer.org/about