General Peter Gadet walks towards his troops at the SPLA Fourth Division Headquarters, in Bentiu, South Sudan, on May 6, 2014. The rebel commander died in April, 2019, yet remains on Canada's sanctions list.Lynsey Addario/Getty Images
For more than five years, a dead man from South Sudan has remained on Canada’s sanctions list, despite repeated efforts by a former Canadian diplomat to alert Ottawa of his demise.
Peter Gadet, a South Sudanese rebel commander, was placed under Canadian sanctions in 2014 for his role in stoking violence and breaching a peace deal. His death of a heart attack was widely reported in April, 2019 – but he has never been removed from the sanctions list.
The diplomat, former ambassador Nicholas Coghlan, said the incident is a sign of larger problems in Canada’s sanctions regime, including a lack of monitoring and enforcement by federal officials.
Canada’s use of sanctions has expanded dramatically in recent years, with more than 4,000 individuals and entities now on its sanctions list, yet federal departments have limited resources to track the names and ensure that the sanctions are still warranted or effective.
Recent reports by House of Commons and Senate committees have questioned whether Ottawa does enough monitoring of the effectiveness of its sanctions.
One expert, Andrea Charron of the University of Manitoba, said Canada has a “fire and forget” approach to sanctions. “We put a name on the list, and then that’s the last we hear from it,” she told a House of Commons committee last year.
“We spend a lot of time up front on whom to target, but we don’t spend a lot of time on looking at what the effect is on these targets and whether we should be maybe adjusting with allies and in response to events on the ground.”
For example, it took Canada three years to lift its sanctions on Ivory Coast and Liberia after the United Nations Security Council had already done so, Prof. Charron noted.
The vast majority of Canada’s sanctions have been imposed on Russian individuals and businesses since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But many others have been targeted as well – most recently three Haitian gang leaders who were hit with asset freezes and travel entry bans by Global Affairs Canada last Friday. It accused the gang leaders of violent criminal acts and human-rights violations that undermined Haiti’s stability.
Mr. Gadet is one of just two South Sudanese on the federal government’s consolidated list of sanctions for South Sudan. (Three others are on a separate Canadian list under what is known as the Sergei Magnitsky law for human-rights abusers.)
Mr. Coghlan, a former Canadian ambassador to South Sudan, said he has repeatedly tried to alert the federal government that Mr. Gadet is dead, using a reporting link on the federal sanctions website, but got no response to his efforts over the past two years.
In testimony to a Senate committee last month, he questioned the continued presence of Mr. Gadet on the sanctions list. “As for enforcement, I’m not encouraged by the fact that one of the only two listed targets from South Sudan has been dead for five years,” he told the committee.
“To be useful, sanctions must be timely, consistently applied, co-ordinated with allies and enforced,” he said.
In April, Canada announced sanctions on six individuals and businesses in Sudan, where massacres and other atrocities have been documented since war began last year – but the announcement came nearly a year after other Western governments had imposed their first sanctions in Sudan.
Only a small handful of individuals in South Sudan and Sudan have been placed under Canadian sanctions, in sharp contrast to the thousands of Russia-related sanctions targets, Mr. Coghlan noted.
“The fact that Gadet is on the Canadian list five years after his death suggests that our listings are often performative,” he told The Globe and Mail.
Asked for an explanation for Mr. Gadet’s continued presence on the sanctions list after his death, Global Affairs Canada did not answer directly. Instead it gave a broader defence of its monitoring of individual sanctions.
“Canada is judicious in its approach to imposing sanctions, against individuals, entities and states, and is committed to their effective and co-ordinated use when appropriate,” Global Affairs spokesperson John Babcock told The Globe.
“Canada regularly reviews individual sanctions regimes as part of its overall due diligence process, and pursues adjustments to these regimes as appropriate. This includes consideration of when some listings should be maintained, regardless of a person’s status.”
Prof. Charron, in response to questions from The Globe, said it is possible that the Canadian sanctions against Mr. Gadet were left in place after his death to prevent his assets from being transferred to someone else. “It would be too easy for Gadet’s assets to be squirrelled away by a bad actor to be used illicitly,” she said.
Mr. Coghlan acknowledged this possibility, but said he found it implausible, from his knowledge of Mr. Gadet. “I have to suspect that, with more than 4,300 names on this list, Canadian officials are in reality unable to track application and enforcement effectively.”
In a report in January, the House of Commons foreign affairs committee called on the federal government to conduct a regular review of its sanctions to ensure that they are still appropriate and that they are still achieving their objectives.
In 2022, the federal government announced it will spend $76-million to create a specialized sanctions bureau at Global Affairs and to bolster the RCMP’s capacity to gather evidence on assets controlled by sanctioned individuals.
But several expert witnesses told the Commons committee that this funding is still insufficient for the task. The United States and Britain have far more staff devoted to sanctions work, the committee was told.
The committee recommended that the government boost the budget of the departments and agencies involved in sanctions. Their budgets should be “at a level commensurate with the growing importance of sanctions policy and the increasing complexity and challenges associated with sanctions implementation and enforcement,” it said.