Treasury sanctions a Colombian president, a Brazilian justice, and a UN human rights official.

The Department of the Treasury, in the past several weeks, has issued a series of sanctions designations against three foreign nationals. The first is President Gustavo Petro of Colombia. The second is Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil. The third is Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.

The grounds for the designations, in each of the three cases, are contested. The Petro designation, by the available reporting, follows the Colombian government’s public criticism of American operations in the Caribbean. The de Moraes designation follows the Justice’s role in the prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, with whom the American President has a friendly public relationship. The Albanese designation follows her UN reporting on the Israeli operations in Gaza, which has been critical of the United States.

The standard legal framework for OFAC sanctions, on the documentary record of three administrations, is intended to apply to terrorism, narcotics trafficking, sanctions-evasion, and certain categories of human-rights abuses. The framework requires, in each designation, the publication of evidence that the designee has engaged in conduct prohibited by statute. The framework does not, in any reasonable construction of the statutes, apply to foreign citizens who have publicly criticized the United States.

President Petro, on Sunday, called the imposition of the sanction “an arbitrary act typical of an oppressive regime.” Justice de Moraes, by reporting in the Brazilian press, has not commented publicly. Ms. Albanese’s family has filed suit, in the District of Columbia, alleging that the President, the Treasury Secretary, and other officials have violated her First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights, and have violated the sanctions framework’s own internal rules.

The pattern, by the standard of how such tools are used, is the matter to mark. The Spanish Prime Minister, who condemned the American operations in Iran as a violation of international law on March 14, was identified by the President, on the same day, as a target for “the secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, to take care of.” The verb “take care of,” in the documentary record, is the verb the President has used in advance of every prior designation in the cycle. The Spanish designation has not, as of the date of this writing, been issued. It is, in the day’s reporting, expected.

There is, in the standard literature on sanctions tools, a useful distinction between sanctions that compel behavior change and sanctions that punish past conduct. The framework permits both. There is, in the standard literature, no use of sanctions for the punishment of foreign-government criticism of the United States. The framework does not permit that.

The pattern, in the day’s reporting, is the move from compliance tool to punishment tool. The American government’s principal economic-coercion mechanism, on the documentary record of this cycle, is being repointed at foreign citizens whose offense, in the available evidence, is having said something the President did not like.

A serious country, in a serious moment, would have published the evidence and accepted the legal challenge on the merits. A less serious country would do what is being done: issue the designation, decline to publish the evidence, and let the courts work it out at their own slow pace.

Calmly documenting the decline.