Analysis ·
The shape of the Consolidated List
The Security Council's sanctions list is not one list but fourteen, and both its largest regime and its busiest single year point at the same event.
The Consolidated List is what the Security Council’s sanctions regimes look like when they are written down: 1,011 entries maintained across 14 separate committees, each with its own resolution behind it and its own criteria for who belongs on it. This piece is about the shape of that list — how it is distributed and when it grew — and about nothing else. It names no one on it.
| Type | Entries |
|---|---|
| Individual | 736 |
| Entity | 275 |
Fourteen regimes, very unevenly filled
| Committee | Entries |
|---|---|
| Al-Qaida | 336 |
| DPRK | 155 |
| Taliban | 140 |
| Iran | 121 |
| Iraq | 75 |
| DRC | 61 |
| Libya | 31 |
| Somalia | 24 |
The largest single regime, Al-Qaida, accounts for about 33 per cent of every entry on its own. A list that reads as one instrument is in practice dominated by a small number of regimes, with a long tail of country committees holding a few dozen entries each.
One year did much of the work
| Year listed | Entries added |
|---|---|
| 2001 | 141 |
| 2016 | 71 |
| 2017 | 69 |
| 2003 | 69 |
| 2010 | 67 |
| 2018 | 51 |
The busiest year on record is 2001, with 141 entries added — several times a typical year, and the same period in which the counter-terrorism regime that still dominates the list was built out. The list is not a steady accretion. It moves in response to events, and the shape it has now is largely the shape it acquired then.
What this page deliberately does not do. The Consolidated List is public because the Security Council decided it should be, and that decision covers the designations themselves. It does not extend to assembling profiles of the people named, so nothing here selects an individual entry, and this table is never joined to any other person-shaped data on this site — not to diplomats, not to postings, not to country records. A sanctions designation joined to a biography becomes something the Council never published. Dates are the date an entry was added to the list, not the date of any underlying conduct, and entries are amended and delisted over time, so a count is a description of the list as we last collected it rather than a running total of anything.
Where this page comes from
- United Nations Security Council Consolidated List — UN document (public domain, ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2) · source