RSSChangelog

For designated entries, the EU Financial Sanctions Files (FSF) sanctions list includes names translated to one or more of the official languages of the European Union.

Currently, all of these names are included in the name field, marking them as primary names. Once this change becomes effective, they will be listed in the alias field. The primary (English) name of the entry will still be listed in the name field.

This change is part of a broader effort to ensure that the name field only contains the highest-quality names available, and that names that can be considered less relevant are listed in alias and weakAlias fields instead.

Users of our hosted API and yente are not affected by this change, as the built-in scoring algorithms consider both the alias and the name fields for matching of names.

After the introduction of sanction program identifiers, we're now migrating a number of smaller national sanctions lists to use the same mechanism. Until now, we annotated hard-coded program names in these datasets (as values for the Sanction:program property).

As these program names are not authoritative, we are now replacing them with Sanction:programId references. This creates a clearer separation between the data provided from source, and analytical annotations stemming from our data pipeline.

Read more about using sanctions programs.

Affected datasets:

• au_listed_terrorist_orgs
• br_ceis
• ca_named_research_orgs
• cz_terrorists
• eu_esma_saris
• interpol_api
• ir_sanctions
• kz_afmrk_sanctions
• li_posting_sanctions
• lt_fiu_freezes
• nz_russia_sanctions
• Pending:
• pk_proscribed_persons
• pl_finanse_sanctions
• ru_mfa_sanctions
• sg_terrorists
• ua_nsdc_sanctions
• un_1718_vessels
• us_bis_denied
• us_cuba_sanctions
• us_ddtc_debarred
• us_ddtc_enforcements
• us_dod_chinese_milcorps
• us_fcc_covered_list
• us_fed_enforcements
• us_hhs_exclusions
• us_state_terrorist_orgs

We're planning to remove the Syrian Observatory of Political and Economic Networks (sy_obsalytics_opensyr) from the regular updates of the default collection on June 9th, 2025. The dataset, created by research group Obsalytics is a one-off import of a small subset of the live database, and the export into OpenSanctions was last updated in February 2023.

Given the increasing rate of change in the sanctions landscape surrounding Syria - with the EU and US both revoking parts of their existing regimes - we've decided to avoid the presence of outdated information on our website by removing this dataset. We recommend interested parties use the available search function for the OpenSyr database for additional research.

We'd like to strongly advise all customers that are using the all dataset to use default instead.

The all dataset is an internal artifact of our data infrastructure. Other than having a pleasing name, it is a strictly inferior data product. As of February 2025, we've reduced the update frequency of all to monthly updates - meaning that users of the all scope will use outdated data in their systems.

all also includes data meant for internal verification/testing purposes which should not be included in production systems (unless you have a regulatory requirement to screen for 1990 "Die Hard" movie villain, John Gruber).

The dataset Liechtenstein Posted Workers Act (EntsG) Sanctions was previously running of a static, outdated version of the data which had been published in HTML format. It will now be updated from a regularly-published PDF file. As part of this update, the IDs of the listed entities are changed, and the topic applied to first-time penalised entities ("Übertretungen" i.S.v Art 9) is changed from debarment to reg.warn.

The sanctions regime under Section 353 of the Corrupt and Undemocratic Actors Report has expired in December 2023. To reflect this, we've removed the topic sanction from all entities in the dataset. We will remove the relevant dataset entirely after November 1, 2024, and move the formerly-designated entities for reference to the US Special Legislative Exclusions dataset

Section 353 concerns foreign individuals who have been reported for knowingly engaging in activities that undermine democratic processes or institutions, participating in significant corruption, or obstructing investigations into such acts in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.