Goodbye to the Right to a Due Judicial Process in Light of Executive Panic
“The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming”: The New Panic
Recent developments involving government institutions in the US and EU bring to mind Norman Jewison’s 1966 Cold War satire, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. In Jewison’s film, when a Soviet submarine runs aground off New England, the small town is gripped by Cold War hysteria. But it breaks down when the residents and the Soviet sailors interact face-to-face. The panic is deflated through direct human engagement.
Once again, Russia is the prime cause of panic in the West. Listening to the hysteric reactions of Western political leaders, I pine for a new version of Jewison’s satire. Along with China, Iran, and the Palestinians, Russia is deemed to be a villain and a threat. Panicked by its actions, leaders of the democratic West have decided that they cannot permit democratic freedoms.
Replacing public trials with algorithmic banking blocks, automated compliance software, and administrative decrees, the state today is enforcing excommunication from a distance, insulating its coercive choices from public scrutiny and human connection.
It is difficult not to react with contempt, combined with anger and foreboding, at the behavior of those who call themselves the leaders of a democratic world.
The Human Dimension of Modern Erasure
For generations, liberal democracies prided themselves on how their adherence to the Rule of Law distinguished them from feudalism and autocracy characterized by executive tyranny. We grew up believing that in a democracy, coercive power was constrained by procedural guardrails: investigation, public indictment, the presumption of innocence, open cross-examination, and impartial judicial adjudication. The executive could accuse, but only an independent court could punish.
Today, that boundary is silently dissolving. A new architecture of state power has emerged—not through military rollbacks, but through the quiet, technocratic expansion of the Executive State. Bypassing the judicial process entirely, executive bodies are deploying administrative decrees, blacklists, executive orders, and regulatory designations to inflict “civil and financial death” on dissenting voices.
This human toll is not an abstract legal concept; it is a lived reality. Here are just a few examples:
- Jacques Baud (Brussels): A former Swiss military intelligence officer, NATO consultant, and UN official whose analytical commentary on Ukraine diverged from the official line. Targeted by EU administrative decrees, Baud was stripped of access to his bank accounts and credit cards. He cannot travel, and anyone providing him with food or material aid risks criminal liability. Living in Belgium, he was barred from returning to his native Switzerland even to attend family funerals.
- Nathalie Yamb (Switzerland / Cameroon): A Swiss-Cameroonian Pan-African activist “designated” under EU administrative measures. Her case illustrates how the EU has extended its executive power into non-EU sovereign territories like Switzerland, using asset freezes, travel bans, and financial exclusion to turn basic civil existence into a revocable state privilege.
- Francesca Albanese (USA): The high-profile UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories operating within US jurisdiction as a resident of New York under diplomatic conventions. She has faced targeted US administrative measures, including visa restrictions, threats of financial containment, and sanctions under US Executive Orders designed to obstruct her diplomatic mandate, revoke her banking access, and isolate her professionally without a single criminal indictment.
- The Unnamed Dozens: Beyond well-known public figures, scores of European residents—at least 47 to 49 individuals in recent executive packages alone—have been targeted by EU decrees and sanctions similar to Jacques Baud’s. Lacking public platforms, financial reserves, or international support networks, these ordinary residents face absolute excommunication, unable to hire legal counsel to challenge their listings.
When the state deprives people of the means of daily survival without due process, the label of “democracy” ceases to retain legal or ethical meaning.
Historical Precedents of State Panic: Worse Than McCarthyism, Cold War Panic, and Red Scares
It is tempting to view this trend as simply a continuation of past historical panics. A good friend, for example, suggested that this has been going on since the days of US Senator Joe McCarthy. It is true that we can trace the evolution of this state panic back to the “Red Scare” that followed the Socialist Revolution and the establishment of the USSR (covering roughly the years 1917–1920). However, I believe what we are witnessing today is structurally far worse.
The Red Scare (1917–1920)
Governments used raw executive sweeps like the Palmer Raids, which were part of J. Edgar Hoover’s fight against Communism, and deportation to target radical labor and non-citizens, relying on executive immigration powers to bypass criminal courts.
The McCarthy Era (1947–1957)
Starting in the late 1940s, after the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazism, the US was consumed by the threat of Communism posed by the Soviet Union, its erstwhile ally in defeating Hitler. The state shifted to institutional purges, loyalty oaths, and legislative exposure. Senator Joseph McCarthy believed that US institutions were infested by Communists and Soviet sympathizers. He embarked on a mission to ferret them out and prosecute them for “Un-American Activities”. The McCarthyist inquisitions resulted in blacklists, lost employment, and social exile. However, those who went to prison did so through formal legal mechanisms, and the inquisition retained a vital public component: open Senate committee hearings where the accused was publicly questioned and had the right to respond.
Modern Administrative Capture
Today’s administrative regime operates in total dark chambers. The targeted individual is neither charged under statutory law nor provided with evidence. Politicians and technocrats sit simultaneously as accusers, inquisitors, and judges—issuing summary decrees that instantly cut off an individual’s access to the necessities of life without a hearing, a trial, or an appeal.
State intervention now synthesizes past precedents into a permanent, automated apparatus. It eliminates the public spectacle of the McCarthy hearings and replaces physical deportation with financial and civil containment.
The Legal Paradox: Extralegal Governance and Executive Decrees
What I am drawing attention to is a legal paradox that strikes deep at the heart of a process that has been deemed central to the democratic political order. Under traditional jurisprudence, punishing an individual requires establishing mens rea and proving specific criminal acts beyond a reasonable doubt in open court. The emerging administrative regime replaces it with a system in which executive agencies function as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and enforcer simultaneously.
Conclusion: Beyond the “Democracy vs. Autocracy” Binary
For decades, global politics has been framed around a simple binary: democracies committed to liberty versus autocracies that rule by decree.
The rise of administrative sanctions, extrajudicial containment, and executive weaponization shatters this distinction. When states that claim the mantle of democracy sidestep their own constitutional protections to inflict civil death on residents without indictment or trial, the difference becomes purely rhetorical.
- It is wrong to strip human beings of their daily survival—their shelter, food, and movement—by executive decree.
- It is wrong to replace open judicial cross-examination with secret administrative lists.
- It is wrong to proclaim a commitment to human rights while condoning extrajudicial deprivation.
The Illiberal Turn does not arrive with sudden political upheaval; it arrives quietly and cumulatively through administrative regulations and automated blacklists. Preserving liberty requires reasserting a fundamental principle: no executive authority possesses the moral or legal right to bypass due process and strip a human being of their civil existence.
Key Legal Analysis and Executive Sources
- Legal Analysis of EU Administrative Sanctions: For an examination of how European administrative sanction lists bypass standard judicial proceedings, see EU Makes Punishment without Trial LEGAL by Dr. Alexandra Hofer.
- Official EU Executive Briefings: For primary coverage of the European Council’s foreign policy decrees under High Representative Kaja Kallas, see Official EU Sanctions Map.
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