OpenSanctions is an international database of persons and companies of political, criminal, or economic interest.
Our data combines the sanctions lists, databases of politically exposed persons, and other information about persons in the public interest into a single, easy-to-use dataset. This makes it easy to:
Collecting persons of interest data is a labour intensive process, including data cleaning and quality assurance. This creates unnecessary and duplicative work for all users of persons-of-interest data, whether they are fintech/regtech technologists, investigative journalists, academics or others.
We believe that the solution to this is to establish a sustainable data commons, an open resource that provides high-quality, up-to-date data, is open to feedback and set up to provide a long-term solution for data sourcing.
The development and maintenance of OpenSanctions is coordinated by a for-profit entity (OpenSanctions Datenbanken GmbH) that offers bulk data subscriptions and API access to the data. Its goal is to produce financial sustainability that allows us to keep the data available and reliable on an ongoing basis.
From 2017 to 2019, maintenance of the crawlers was assumed by Tarashish Mishra at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. You can see a list of those who have contributed crawlers on Github.
We'd also like to thank Marc da Costa, Paul May and Tony Bowden for their tireless advice on the project.
From September 2021 to Feburary 2022, the project received financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) under the grant identifier 01IS21S48
. The full responsibility for the content of this publication remains with its
authors.
OpenSanctions is free for non-commercial users. Businesses must acquire a data license to use the dataset.