Digital Lettres de cachet : how the EU punishes without judging

A Swiss colonel can no longer buy his groceries. A Berlin journalist can no longer feed his twins. Their crime? Saying things that displease the European Council. Not before a court, before no one at all. One morning, the account is frozen, the passport invalidated, existence suspended. Without trial, without a judge, without criminal law. Welcome to the new European law.

The Baud precedent: when military analysis becomes an offense

Jacques Baud is a former colonel in the Swiss army, a published military analyst, a regular guest in international media. On December 15, 2025, the European Union added him to its sanctions list. The official reason: he allegedly appears in media that don’t relay the dominant narrative on the war in Ukraine and allegedly spreads “Russian propaganda.” In May 2025, the journalist Hüseyin Dogru, a German citizen based in Berlin, had been hit by the same procedure (the first EU citizen sanctioned while residing on European soil) for his coverage of the conflict in Gaza, branded “disinformation.”

These are neither arms traffickers nor oligarchs. They are people who write and who speak. And for that, the European Council (that is, the heads of state and government, meeting behind closed doors) decided to inflict on them a total freeze of their assets, a ban on movement throughout the EU, and a prohibition on anyone providing them with the slightest financial assistance. Baud had to apply for a “humanitarian waiver” from the Belgian government to access his accounts and buy something to eat. The accounts of Dogru’s wife were frozen too, even though she doesn’t appear on the sanctions list; leaving a family of five, including two newborns, with 506 euros a month that the bank regularly blocks.

Let that sentence sink in for a moment. A European citizen has to ask permission to feed himself because he expressed an opinion. Baud himself sums up the situation to RTS (Switzerland’s public broadcaster): it’s a political sanction, not a legal one, with nothing to indicate he committed any offense.

Administrative policing, criminal violence: the legal sleight of hand

Here is the heart of the scandal. The EU classifies its individual sanctions itself as “restrictive measures” falling under foreign policy; tools of administrative policing, not criminal law. The distinction is decisive. Administrative policing is the identity check, the temporary closure of a bar, the withdrawal of an operating license. Measures designed for emergencies, prevention, the management of flows. They require no trial, no adversarial hearing, no presumption of innocence; precisely because they are not supposed to punish.

Yet what do the sanctions against Baud and Dogru actually do? They freeze the entirety of their assets. They forbid them to work, to travel, to receive the slightest assistance. They destroy their reputation, their career, their means of subsistence. In Germany, anyone who offers Dogru a glass of water risks up to five years in prison. These are de facto penalties (heavier than a criminal fine, more devastating than a suspended sentence) but stripped of all the safeguards that criminal law took centuries to build.

This is where the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (no crime, no penalty without a prior law) is trampled with eyes wide open. Article 8 of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 49 of the EU’s own Charter of Fundamental Rights. There is no European legal text that defines the “spreading of disinformation” or “Russian propaganda” as an offense. No penalty is set out in any code. The Council decides ad hoc, in closed session, on the basis of political reasoning. The European Commission itself acknowledges that Articles 29 TEU and 215 TFEU (the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU) do not constitute a legal basis for harmonizing criminal definitions. MEP (Member of the European Parliament) Fabio De Masi put a question to the Commission in January 2026 asking what concrete evidence it held. No satisfactory answer.

The trick is of a baffling simplicity: you use the “administrative” label to escape the safeguards of criminal law, while inflicting consequences that only criminal law should be able to inflict. Renaming the Criminal Code the “Code of Restrictive Measures” would change nothing about its nature. But the EU does exactly the reverse; and gets away with it.

The three-stage rocket

What makes this affair dizzying isn’t that it’s isolated. It’s that it fits into a machinery I’ve been observing and documenting for months on this blog; a methodical three-stage escalation.

Stage one: delegated censorship. With the DSA (Digital Services Act), Brussels has built an apparatus for controlling online speech by outsourcing moderation to private platforms through “Trusted Flaggers,” trusted reporters with no democratic mandate, no accountability, no recourse for those targeted. France played a discreet architect’s role there, with Macron having made the “fight against disinformation” a central plank of his digital policy. When you delete a post or de-index an account, the impact is limited. The individual loses visibility, not their means of subsistence.

Stage two: the control infrastructure. The DSA wasn’t enough. It was necessary to ensure that even the “sovereign” alternatives stayed within the perimeter. That’s the point of projects like W Social, a “European” social network presented at Davos with mandatory identity verification, standardized human moderation, and bureaucratic operating hours. It’s also the point of the European digital identity and the digital euro: pipes that, once in place, make it possible to identify, to track, and (when the day comes) to cut off anyone, anytime. I described this gradual lockdown in connection with the RED directive on smartphones (the Radio Equipment Directive) and the Chat Control proposal.

Stage three: existential punishment. We move from soft power to hard power. No more need to delete a post: you delete the person economically. The asset freeze, the travel ban, the impossibility of receiving the slightest assistance: these are sentences of civil death, handed down without trial. As political scientist Pascal Lottaz sums it up, the activities of the sanctioned individuals are perfectly legal in the EU, but the Council arrogates to itself the power to impose coercive measures to “encourage a change in behavior.” The EU had already tested the mechanism with the 235 billion euros in frozen Russian assets. The innovation is that it now applies it to its own citizens, and to Swiss nationals, which is rather rich when you recall the pressure exerted on the Swiss Confederation to align ever more closely with the EU body of law (the acquis communautaire).

France doesn’t flinch, because it does the same

If Brussels was able to industrialize this drift, it’s because the member states had already normalized it at home. France, in particular, has no reason to be outraged: for decades it has practiced this same blurring of the administrative and the criminal, this same substitution of the executive for the judge.

I documented the most blatant case in an article on URSSAF (France’s social-security contribution collection agency). Here is an organization that can freeze your bank account without a court ruling, garnish your income without notice, bring a company to its knees in a matter of weeks, all on the basis of a code it interprets itself, with no prior judicial review. The difference with the European sanctions? URSSAF at least acts on the basis of a text (the Social Security Code), however badly drafted it may be. The Council of the EU doesn’t even have that crutch. But the logic is identical: punish first, let the victim defend themselves afterward, if they still have the means.

The same machinery operates elsewhere. ARCOM (France’s audiovisual and digital regulator) sets itself up as a cultural censor and forces platforms to shut down with no parliamentary debate. The ZFE (Low-Emission Zones, which bar vehicles deemed too polluting from city centers) impose driving bans by municipal decision, social penalties, heavy with consequences for low-income households, without Parliament ever having voted on the principle. And when the street rumbles, the reflex isn’t to listen but to manufacture consent through permanent stupefaction.

This isn’t an accident. It’s a political culture. The same one that allowed Sarkozy to betray the 2005 referendum (on the European Constitution) without anyone taking to the streets. The same one that has turned the EU, step by step, into a machine for grinding down sovereignties behind the screen of “European solidarity.” The pattern repeats: you create a “temporary” or “targeted” mechanism, no one protests because the first people targeted are unpopular (oligarchs, propagandists, tax evaders), and the mechanism widens until it becomes permanent and universal.

Judicial recourse, or the farce of the final act

Hans-Georg Maaßen, former head of the BfV (Germany’s domestic intelligence service), points out in an article for the Weltwoche (a Swiss weekly) a detail that completes the picture: recourse before the Court of Justice of the EU is theoretically available. In practice, when a sanctioned person wins their case, the Council adopts the same sanction again, with a barely retouched justification. It’s a merry-go-round, not a remedy.

We know the technique. It’s the same as URSSAF’s when faced with a challenge: you relaunch the procedure from a slightly different angle, and the taxpayer or the company eventually wears out. It’s also the technique of alleged election interference: you label as a “threat to democracy” anything that’s inconvenient, and the accusation becomes the sanction. And when 80 public figures (researchers, jurists, philosophers, parliamentarians) call for the sanctions against Baud to be lifted, the institutional silence remains deafening.

What this says about us

The argument of these sanctions’ defenders is well known: we are in a “hybrid war.” Russia destabilizes European democracies through the manipulation of information, and exceptional measures are required to defend the democratic order. The intention may be sincere. But the argument destroys itself: you don’t defend democracy by suspending the fundamental rights that constitute it. You don’t protect the rule of law by creating a parallel criminal law freed from the judge. And you don’t fight propaganda by giving the executive the discretionary power to decide what is true and what is false; for that is precisely the definition of state propaganda.

It would be comfortable to file this affair away in the “geopolitics” drawer. To tell ourselves that Baud and Dogru “played with fire.” But if “disinformation” is an offense, then let it be defined by law, before a Parliament, with adversarial debate. Let the penalties be set. Let trials be held with judges, lawyers, effective avenues of appeal. Let the presumption of innocence be respected. Let the accused be treated as human beings and not as targets to be neutralized by decree.

Until that’s the case, the EU’s individual sanctions are not law. They are digital lettres de cachet (the sealed royal warrants of France’s Ancien Régime that allowed imprisonment without trial or charge): acts of pure power, coated in a legal veneer that no one dares to scratch.

Pavel Durov, in his marathon interview with Lex Fridman, said in essence: free speech only exists for the speech that bothers people. For the rest, it’s useless.

The EU has just proved him right. And France, true to itself, looks away.