We transcribe every EU sanctions designation from the legal acts in the Official Journal, including the vessel, export-control, and sectoral listings the consolidated list omits.
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We transcribe every EU sanctions designation from the legal acts in the Official Journal, including the vessel, export-control, and sectoral listings the consolidated list omits.
The Council of the European Union adopts sanctions as legal acts and publishes them in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), where they take effect on the day of publication. The European Commission then republishes a subset of those designations as the EU Financial Sanctions Files (FSF), the consolidated list most screening systems consume. The EU is the only major sanctions authority where the body that adopts a designation is not the body that maintains the machine-readable list, and the split leaves two gaps for anyone screening against the FSF alone.
The Commission republishes a designation days after it appears in the Journal. In 2024 we documented a 21-day delay. During that window a firm is bound by the sanction, but its screening data does not contain it. The gap matters because Journal amendments enter into force on publication, and the Instant Payments Regulation requires payment service providers to check their customers against new or amended EU sanctions immediately after they take effect.
The FSF is a list of financial sanctions and contains only persons and entities subject to an asset freeze. Designations under any other EU measure are not included in the FSF: vessels denied port access or maritime services, entities under export controls, and companies subject to sectoral financial and investment restrictions.
The EU Council Official Journal Sanctioned Entities dataset (eu_journal_sanctions) contains every designation in force under the EU's more than 40 sanctions framework regulations and decisions, transcribed from the legal acts as the Council publishes them in the Official Journal. It covers every kind of listing the acts contain:
| Listing type | Example | Journal dataset | FSF |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset freezes on persons and entities | Annex I of Regulation 269/2014 (Ukraine territorial integrity) | Yes | Yes |
| Vessels under port-access and maritime-services bans | Annex XLII of Regulation 833/2014 (the Russian "shadow fleet"), North Korea vessel annexes | Yes | No |
| Entities under export controls | Annex IV of Regulation 833/2014, Annex V of Regulation 765/2006 (Belarus) | Yes | No |
| Entities under financial, services, and investment restrictions | Sectoral annexes of the Russia and Belarus regulations | Yes | No |
Each entity carries a Sanction record naming the program, the measure imposed (asset freeze, export control, transportation restrictions, financial restrictions, services ban, or investment ban), the annex entry number, the listing reason as printed, and the date of listing. The sourceUrl on every entity points to the exact act on EUR-Lex that the data was transcribed from, so any value in a profile can be checked against the printed annex.
Entities that appear in both this dataset and the FSF are deduplicated into one profile that shows both sources.
EU-regulated firms should screen against the EU Sanctions collection. It combines the Journal dataset, the FSF, and the national sanctions lists of EU member states such as France and the Czech Republic in one pass. The vessel listings are also included in the maritime collection.
The Publications Office of the EU stores every act, and every consolidated version of every act, in its CELLAR repository. We poll it every 15 minutes and detect a new sanctions act within minutes of publication. New designations typically appear in the dataset within hours of the act appearing in the Journal.
Data enters the dataset by two routes, held to different standards.
For each framework act we maintain a dedicated parser that reads the consolidated text of the act, walks every annex, and reproduces it as a complete snapshot of the designations in force. The parsers are strict: an annex, label, or date format the parser has not seen before produces an error instead of being skipped or guessed. Re-running a parser against the same text reproduces the snapshot byte for byte.
Between consolidations, the Council publishes amending regulations that add or change entries. These are extracted by an inference-based transcription harness that reads the act and writes its designations to a draft amendment file, using the framework parser's entry grammar so the result is consistent with the snapshot that later absorbs it. We then review the draft file against the published act before it is merged. Transcription is structural extraction only: values are recorded as the act prints them, and normalization happens later in the pipeline. Any cell can be checked against the annex it came from.
A designation stays in the dataset for as long as the consolidated text of its framework act lists it. When the Publications Office publishes a new consolidated version, the parser is re-run and any entry the Council has removed leaves the dataset. Removals therefore take effect when the consolidated text is published, not on the day of the delisting act. Until then the entity remains listed.
The snapshots and transcriptions are plain files in the public opensanctions repository, so the history of each act's annexes, and the act that introduced each designation, is open to inspection. Any gap between what CELLAR holds and what the dataset has transcribed is a warning on the dataset's issues page until it is closed. The operational guide describes the detection, transcription, and review process in detail.