Of terrorists and combatants: the application of EU anti-terrorists measures to situations of armed conflict in the general Court’s ruling concerning the Liberation Tigers of Amil Eelam

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ruling of the General Court raises interesting questions concerning restrictive measures, which have seldom, if ever, been addressed by EU courts. In particular, the General Court was called upon to rule on the applicability of EU anti-terrorism legislation to a situation of armed conflict, and on some procedural issues such as the possibility for EU institutions to rely on open-source material in order to ground listing decisions. The article analyses the General Court’s approach to these issues, and argues that according to both EU and international law, as rightly pointed out by the General Court, the existence of an armed conflict does not rule out a priori the simultaneous applicability of branches of law other than international humanitarian law, including, as in the case at stake, EU anti-terrorism law. The article further argues that the approach taken by the General Court in this case with regard to procedural issues appears to be slightly too formalistic. In so doing, the General Court is arguably making the EU institutions’ life too hard when it comes to the imposition of targeted sanctions