IN RECENT weeks, alarming reports of EU censorship have echoed around political circles.

These reports have been given most recent impetus by the “un-personning” (through use of EU sanctions) of retired Swiss Army Colonel and military historian, Jacques Baud, a man of impeccable establishment credentials, who formerly worked for Nato (as a monitor of small arms proliferation in Ukraine) and for various United Nations bodies.

Last month, Baud discovered via a phone call from a journalist that his name had been included on a list of people to be sanctioned under a programme introduced by the EU in 2022 to target Russian citizens.

Baud is a Swiss, rather than a Russian citizen. He has never been informed of the reason for his inclusion on the list, but it appears that French military intelligence requested it and EU Council of Ministers approved it with scarcely a second thought.

A petition circulating in support of Baud has been signed by thousands of his fellow Swiss as well as international academics, journalists and political figures from the Communist Party of Switzerland to the Belgian Workers’ Party, but thus far, the Swiss government has been unwilling or unable to protect its citizen.

The result of Baud being named on the list of sanctioned people is a total prohibition on his ability to access his bank account (frozen), use credit cards, pay rent, buy food, or travel from his home in Brussels to his own country, Switzerland.

In the age of electronic payments and online tracking this is in effect a prison sentence without any charge, trial, or right to represent oneself against false accusations.

In a truly Kafkaesque twist, a sanction is not considered to be a punishment, does not require a crime to have been committed, nor a charge of criminality to be brought. That would be too easy and of course, would give those accused a legal recourse to appeal.

In theology, the correct name for this process is anathemisation — the process of cursing, condemning, or declaring someone or something to be evil. In medieval Europe, to be anathemised, was to be placed beyond the protection of the law, to be outlawed and to be forced out of the city or town into the forest. But even that possibility does not appear to be available to Jacques Baud.

The furore over the EU sanctions on Baud has brought to light an authoritarian, dystopian nightmare affecting many other people. The EU has proceeded down the legal vacuum of the sanctions path against various Russian politicians and businessmen with little opposition.

But, unstated in this process was always the inevitable consequence that the EU sanctions regime would be used against its own citizens and against the citizens of third countries such as Baud.

Already the case of a Swiss-Cameroonian national, Nathalie Yamb has come to light since Baud’s case achieved notoriety. Nathalie Yamb is a Pan-Africanist who campaigns against France’s continuing neocolonial presence in Francophone west Africa. Again, Yamb appears to have been sanctioned by the EU at the request of French authorities.

Both these cases — and others such as that of German journalist, Huseyin Dogru — are becoming widely known. Such censorship and authoritarianism should be a cause celebre for the left.

The victims of EU sanctions regimes, beyond those whose names are included on unaccountable lists, are ordinary citizens who are deprived of the right to hear arguments and reporting that is deliberately excluded by corporate media.

The EU may now be sanctioning individual citizens, but it has been shutting down information (of course, described as “disinformation”) for years. The absence of official Russian news outlets such a Tass and RIA Novosti in Britain and the EU is a reminder that censorship today is more severe than even at the height of the cold war.