Germany’s top civil court says German government broke the law in formerly sanctioned billionaire’s case. I am living the consequences.
Hüseyin Doğru is a German journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. He has been sanctioned by the European Union
Cross-posted from Hüseyin’s Substack
For the past year and a half, the German government has insisted that I can challenge the EU sanctions imposed upon me through the courts. But an explosive piece published last week by Germany’s Welt newspaper reveals how the German government coordinated with a senior court official to obstruct legal proceedings against the EU Council.
In an email seen by the newspaper, a Foreign Office official wrote, “We do not want… these measures to be influenced, let alone reviewed, by the national courts of the Member States.”
The correspondence has come to light as a result of a lawsuit brought by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who was sanctioned in 2022 under the claim he “reportedly served as a frontman for the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and solved his business problems”. The source was Forbes magazine, and the wording identical to that in its article which read: “Usmanov solved Putin’s business problems”. In 2024, a Hamburg court prohibited Forbes from repeating the allegation after it “was unable to provide a single example of Usmanov acting as a frontman”, Welt reported. Yet the EU Council maintained the allegation in its sanctions listing, despite making a minor change to its wording. As a result, Usmanov also brought injunction proceedings against the Council, and in December 2023 a Hamburg judge ordered his lawsuit to be served in Brussels.
What happened next Welt described as a Kafkaesque “violation of the separation of powers”.
Not only did the president of the Hamburg court defy the presiding judge’s order to serve the injunction on the EU, but he coordinated with the German Ministry of Justice and Foreign Office. The latter, which was under then-Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, rejected any review of EU sanctions by national courts, saying in the same email: “We have a substantial foreign-policy interest in ensuring that this system established by the treaties is not undermined.”
So, for political reasons, the president of a German court, under pressure from the government, prevented an independent judge’s order to serve legal proceedings on the EU Council from being carried out. Welt highlighted that the German constitution guarantees recourse to the courts when a person’s rights are violated by public authority. As such, it concluded that the developments in the Usmanov case amounted to a violation of the separation of powers, “a fundamental principle of the rule of law”, and was “particularly serious in a case involving alleged misconduct by public authorities, where the executive itself is effectively in the dock”.
For almost three years, the German government had its way. That ended last month when Germany’s highest civil court ruled that the refusal to serve the lawsuit was unlawful and violated Usmanov’s rights. Now politics has to move over, and the court must serve legal proceedings on the EU Council.
A ray of hope, perhaps. But the reality is bleaker. Usmanov is one of the 200-richest men in the world, whose lawyer has represented the likes of Elon Musk, Roman Abramovich and Alice Weidel. Despite the extraordinary resources at his disposal, it took him almost three years just to win the right to have his lawsuit delivered to Brussels.
Ultimately, though, it was not a court that brought an end to the sanctions on him. That legal process must usually be pursued before the more arduous EU courts rather than national courts. But we will never know how the EU courts would have ruled in Usmanov’s case because his delisting in September this year instead came about because of backdoor political bargaining, including France’s reported deal to secure a prisoner’s release from Azerbaijan in exchange for his removal from the sanctions list.
Now consider my position. I depend on the generosity of a foundation to pay my lawyers, lawyers who are committed to representing clients from oppressed and marginalised backgrounds, not the rich and powerful. My only asset is a second-hand car, which I no longer have access to as a result of the sanctions. I have neither Usmanov’s wealth nor the political connections that such wealth buys. So when the government repeatedly tells me I can seek justice through the courts, perhaps now, dear reader, you can begin to appreciate how absurd that assurance is.
In May 2025, while my wife was enduring a high-risk pregnancy with twins, I became the first EU citizen living within the bloc to be sanctioned for journalistic work. To be clear, these are not criminal accusations. For 16 months my lawyers have been awaiting a date for the EU General Court to decide on my case. Meanwhile last month, shortly after the EU Council delisted Usmanov in an opaque deal, it informed my lawyers that it would be renewing the sanctions on me. In the same letter it asserted that I am not entitled to presumption of innocence because I have done nothing criminal in nature.
So there is no charge, no trial, and no opportunity to defend myself before the sanctions were imposed. Despite it being acknowledged I am not a criminal, the consequences are more severe than many criminal sentences. My bank accounts with my meagre savings are frozen. I cannot travel or work. I am permitted access to a mere 506 euros of my own money each month.
Under Germany’s sanctions implementation law, anyone who gives one of my three children so much as a bottle of water on my behalf could, in principle, face criminal prosecution for sanctions circumvention.
My family, which I can no longer support financially, has also been punished alongside me. In March 2026, the government’s sanctions enforcement agency froze my wife’s bank accounts, using the fact that she had taken over the insurance on our seized family car as evidence that I “control” her finances.
Because of the sanctions on me, she carries the entire financial burden of our home and so the seizure of all her money threatened not just her well-being but our children’s, including then small twin babies, too. Eight days later, a Cologne court suspended the freeze on her accounts, finding “serious doubts as to the lawfulness” of the order and calling the justification “unconvincing”. As a result, the sanctions agency revoked the measure.
Another recent success in national courts came was against a taz writer who was also part of the campaign that led to my sanctions. He filed a criminal complaint against me for defamation. The Berlin prosecutor dropped it, finding my posts “still covered by freedom of expression”. That writer, who has since received an award from a pro-Israel military lobby group for his “journalism”, lost a defamation case he brought against me when a Berlin prosecutor found my work exposing his background to be protected by freedom of expression.
These examples demonstrate why it’s more convenient for the government to keep national courts away from EU sanctions, and instead leave any challenge to the slow and labyrinthine EU court system. Yet the difficulty of challenging these sanctions would be troubling enough even if they rested on solid evidence. As a 2023 Politico investigation cited in Welt’s exposé revealed, EU sanctions often rest on “sloppy evidence”. In response to the case my lawyers submitted to the EU General Court, the Council responded that they “may rely on any publicly available sources without having to await the result of a police investigation or of national proceedings”.
They also say they are “not under an obligation to demonstrate ‘current links’ with the government of the Russian Federation”. In other words, they are reversing the burden of proof.
Examining Usmanov’s case, there are striking parallels in how the Council built on unsubstantiated media reports in both our cases. Putting the media’s claims against me aside for a moment, nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the evidence pack compiled by the EU’s foreign policy arm, the EEAS.
The pack, which I am forbidden from publishing despite that it formed the basis for the sanctions on me, begins by repeating the listing’s false description of me as a Turkish national, and adds a further incorrect detail: that I was born in Istanbul.
I am an exclusively German citizen, born and bred in Frankfurt am Main. The rest of the 38-page document consists almost entirely of screenshots of accurate social media posts published by me, and my now-defunct media outlet red. Most of them are critical of the state of German society or government policy.
For example, one of the offending exhibits is a screenshot of a red. video which you can watch here.
The video reports how pro-Israel CDU politician Ottilie Klein asks whether the German government knows about red., which she described as “popular with anti-Israel protesters”. The government went further, classifying its answer as restricted information and arguing that even disclosing whether intelligence existed concerning red. could compromise the work of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. We already knew we were on the radar of German “security circles” because two weeks earlier, the Tagesspiegel newspaper reported as much. Yet the EU’s evidence pack described our reporting that we were under surveillance as false, without explaining what exactly was incorrect.
Another exhibit is of this video, where German MP Christoph de Vries ranked ethnic groups on an “integration scale”, placing ethnic Germans from Russia and Asian migrants near the top while describing Turkish and Arab migrants as being at “the lower end of this integration scale”.
The evidence pack says red. “falsely claims that a member of the German CDU party sorted people with a history of migration according to a rating portraying one of Germany’s major political parties as anti-Turkish and Arab.” But the video is of the man himself saying just that. I could go on, but the entire 38 pages contain examples like this, alongside two German newspaper articles by Tagesspiegel and taz published in the year before I was listed. These deserve special attention.
I believe, like the Forbes piece in Usmanov’s case, these pieces evolved into the blueprint for the wording used by the EU to sanction me. Both articles rely heavily on insinuation and suspicion, which was then adopted by various authorities, from the US government to the EU, with escalated wording and devastating consequences.
In June 2024, the same Tagesspiegel article mentioned above set the tone of what would follow with its headline: Connection to Moscow? Who is behind the videos of protests against Israel? It described our early access to the Humboldt University occupation two weeks earlier, and contrasted that with how most German media on the scene was treated with hostility by the Palestine solidarity activists. It did not mention that the protesters’ behaviour stemmed from the media witch-hunt they had been subjected to in the preceding months, nor that building trust with activists and securing access is standard, and often celebrated, journalistic practice.
“Another detail suggests that ‘Red’ was indeed aware of the plans to occupy Humboldt University from the very beginning,” the article continued, referring to Instagram collaboration posts shared between red. and pro-Palestinian activist accounts. Despite this being a common tactic to maximise reach, Tagesspiegel claimed it as evidence that a sinister “arrangement must have existed” between red. and the occupiers. It then claimed “the trail leads to a Russian propaganda network,” referring only to information from “German security circles”, with no further detail.
In September 2024, this unsubstantiated allegation escalated into an even wilder claim by the US State Department, then under Antony Blinken. In a statement claiming “RT covertly runs” red., the US government developed Tagesspiegel’s suspicion of us “coordinating with protesters” into an assertion that we had definitively “participated in the organization of protests in Germany”. The State Department’s cited source for this claim? “Per German newspaper Tagesspiel [sic]”.
Now armed with an even more powerful source, the aforementioned writer at taz, whose criminal complaint against me was later dropped, jumped at the opportunity. In October 2024, he reported the State Department’s claim and went a step further, falsely claiming that AFA Medya (the legal entity operating red.) has a “mailbox address” in Istanbul and asked if this was “in order to circumvent European sanctions against Russia?”
The taz writer also insinuated that because some of red.’s staff, including myself, had worked for Redfish, which was openly a subsidiary of RT’s video agency Ruptly, this was further evidence of a connection to Moscow. He did not mention that our editorial independence at the radical-left Redfish, which routinely critiqued Putin allies, and covered anti-war protests across Russia, would be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of global politics.
So the State Department escalated Tagesspiegel’s unsubstantiated reporting, and taz in turn escalated the State Department’s claim of red. being part of a Russian plot and firmly situated red. within Moscow’s supposed strategy of “trying to strengthen everything that destabilises liberal Western democracy.” Two days after new EU legislation that expanded the sanctions regime had entered into force, classifying “hybrid threats” and disinformation as sanctionable offences, the taz piece, headlined “Hybrid War in Berlin”, fed the EU the language it needed to justify targeting red. and me personally.
The EU’s evidence pack summarised the Tagesspiegel article as demonstrating “RED’s involvement in violent protests” and “prior knowledge of these actions requiring coordination with the violent protestors.” Recall that Tagesspiegel’s wording was milder. The newspaper “suggests” red. had prior knowledge of the protests, while the EEAS, like the State Department, categorically accuses red. of “involvement”. The sanctions listing then sets this in stone: “RED personnel coordinated with the occupiers to disseminate images of their vandalism […] facilitating the violent nature of the protest.”
On taz’s part, its insinuation that red. was part of Russia’s “destabilisation” strategy appears in the evidence pack as an example of “the destabilizing activities of RED.media (theredstream) in Germany analyzing its financing channels and connections to the Russian Federation”, although taz did not credibly demonstrate any of this. This evolved into its final form in the sanctions listing as: red. “supports actions by the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability and security in the Union”.
Meanwhile, the German government continues to insist that justice is available to me through the courts. But 16 months since my lawyers submitted my case to the EU General Court will soon become 17 months without even a date for when a judgement might be reached. Every day that passes is another day in which I cannot earn a living, cannot access my own money, and must watch my family suffer the consequences of unsubstantiated accusations that led to the sanctions. Time itself is punishment.
What’s worse is that Usmanov’s case demonstrates not only how flimsy media allegations have been used as the basis for sanctions, but most shockingly, how the German government has stood in the way of legal redress.
There is a vast difference between me and someone like Usmanov, who has the resources to sue every cog in the machine that damaged his reputation with false information. I do not.
If only it were my reputation and some dispensable business interests at stake — it’s my life.
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