What are comprehensive sanctions?
Comprehensive sanctions prohibit substantially all trade, financial and service dealings with a target jurisdiction or its government rather than with named individuals. They work as a territorial embargo, subject to narrow licences and humanitarian exemptions.
Comprehensive programmes are the strictest form of sanctions and are used sparingly. In US practice they have applied to jurisdictions such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria, and to occupied regions of Ukraine, while the EU and the UK maintain territorial measures of their own that do not always match. Teams tend to assume a comprehensive programme means country blocking in the payment system, when it also reaches goods, services, brokering and, in some regimes, the activities of foreign subsidiaries.
What this workflow covers
SCOPE- Geography joins the screening scope: addresses, ports, shipping routes and IP-based signals, not only names.
- A booking to a port inside the territory is prohibited even when no party on it is designated.
- Humanitarian carve-outs cover food, medicine and medical devices, and the payment channel funding them can still be restricted.
- No list hit at all is entirely compatible with a prohibited shipment.
Compliance glossary
TERMS- Embargo
- A prohibition on trade with a territory or government, usually covering goods, services and related financing.
- Humanitarian exemption
- A carve-out permitting food, medicine or medical devices despite an otherwise comprehensive prohibition, on stated conditions.
Authoritative references
SOURCES- 01Sanctions Programs and Country Information
U.S. Department of the Treasury — OFAC
- 02EU Sanctions Map
European Union
Frequently asked questions
Q&A- Which countries are comprehensively sanctioned right now?
- The set changes and differs by authority, so check the current programme pages of OFAC, the European Commission and the UK before you rely on any list, including this one. What is comprehensive under one regime can be partial under another.
- Can any business be done with such a country?
- Only where a general licence or exemption covers it, and the recurring cases are humanitarian goods, personal remittances and certain telecommunications. Identify the authorisation before the transaction, not after, and document its conditions including any reporting obligation.
- Do we still name-screen if the country is embargoed?
- Yes. Territorial control sits on top of name screening rather than replacing it, because designated persons connected to the territory carry additional prohibitions and ownership consequences.