TRADING IN PRESSURE: THE INTERNATIONAL LEGALITY OF PAIRING SANCTIONS WITH PUNITIVE TARIFFS AS INSTRUMENTS OF STATE COERCION

The concurrent deployment of economic sanctions and punitive tariffs by major trading powers has produced a novel and understudied challenge for public international law. Individually, each instrument carries a recognized, if contested, legal genealogy: sanctions find their footing in Chapter VII of the UN Charter and a network of domestic emergency powers statutes, while punitive tariffs are notionally governed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its progeny under the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. When paired, however, these two instruments operate in a legal space that is neither fully captured by WTO dispute settlement nor adequately addressed by general international law. This article argues that the practice of sanctions-tariff pairing, as exemplified by United States conduct toward China since 2018 and by the European Union's Anti-Coercion Instrument adopted in 2023, represents a qualitatively distinct form of economic coercion that strains existing legal categories. Drawing on WTO jurisprudence, ICJ case law, and a comparative analysis of domestic anti-coercion instruments, the article evaluates whether the combined use of these tools violates the non-intervention principle, the good faith obligation in treaty law, or specific prohibitions embedded in the WTO agreements. It concludes that while no single rule clearly prohibits the pairing, the cumulative practice of weaponizing trade points toward an emergent norm that demands fresh multilateral architecture.