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# Who can switch off the euro?
- URL: https://www.cyberverso.net/who-can-switch-off-the-euro/
- Published: 2026-10-05T12:17:36.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-05T12:17:36.000Z
- Description: Not the currency, but the accounts, the cards and the rails it runs on: where the difference lies between having euros and being able to use them.
- Author: Paolo De Rosa
- Tags: currency, infrastructures, policy, #en, #tx-switch-off-euro, #Import 2026-10-05 10:47

[Last year I argued that the digital euro was a question of sovereignty](https://www.cyberverso.net/digital-currencies-a-question-of-sovereignty/): whether money, in its digital form, would remain public infrastructure or be outsourced to private rails. That piece asked who would control digital money. This one asks a harder question, because the past twelve months have answered the first in a way I did not expect. Europe can own its currency, it can build its own payment rails, and it can still watch a European bank freeze a European account on a Tuesday because a list was published in Washington the week before.

## A court that may not be able to pay its staff

The International Criminal Court sits in The Hague. Its budget is in euro, its staff are paid in euro, and the treaty that created it has almost every EU state among its parties. None of that has protected it. [According to the Associated Press, Washington has sanctioned more than a dozen current and former staff of the court, including half of its sitting judges, and Dutch officials have been told that sanctions on the court as a whole are imminent](https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/netherlands-bracing-potentially-devastating-us-sanctions-icc-136616246). The host state is now working out how to keep the court running if that happens: how to pay staff and protected witnesses, how to keep the detention facility secure, whether the court will still be able to use banks and IT services at all.

What the sanctions do to a single person is instructive, because none of it touches the currency. [The court's then prosecutor had his bank accounts closed and his US visa revoked; the Canadian judge Kimberly Prost lost her credit cards the moment she was designated, and Amazon's Alexa stopped answering her](https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-international/ap-cut-off-by-their-banks-and-even-iced-out-by-alexa-sanctioned-icc-staffers-remain-resolute/). [The prosecutor also lost his official Microsoft email account and moved to a Swiss provider, although Microsoft's president has denied that the company shut it](https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/156691-how-sanctions-can-weaponize-us-tech-against-the-icc.html).

Nothing in this list is money. It is accounts, cards, email, a voice assistant. The euro the judges are paid in has not lost a cent and has not been touched by any European authority. What has been switched off is not the money but access to it. Accounts, cards, software and payment networks all sit between having money and being able to use it.

## Who can switch it off?

It helps to stop thinking of money as a single object and think of it as a chain. At one end there is the currency itself, issued by the central bank. Then there is the account where you keep it. Then the network along which it moves: a card scheme, an instant-payment system, and, for anything that crosses borders or touches dollars, a correspondent bank, another bank your bank needs in order to move money abroad. Then the technology all of that runs on: the cloud, the identity provider, the fraud engine, the app store. And at the far end there is the law, which says who may be refused any of the above, and on what grounds.

For each link, the only question that matters for sovereignty is: who can switch it off?

The currency itself is controlled by the Eurosystem. The account, by your bank, and your bank may switch it off when keeping it open threatens its own access to the rest of the system. The network, whoever owns the network, and [non-European card schemes process nearly two thirds of card transactions in the euro area](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2026/html/ecb.sp260618~da08e71469.en.pdf). The technology, whoever operates it, often a handful of large non-European companies. The law, in principle the Union, in practice whatever the Union has actually written down.

The ICC case shows all five links under strain at once, at the level of an institution. Two Italian cases from the past year show the same chain from two other vantage points: a single person, and the bank in between.

## The individual and the intermediary

In 2025 the United States sanctioned the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese. She is an Italian citizen, resident in Europe, not subject to any European, UN or Italian measure. She asked to open an account at Banca Etica, an Italian bank founded on an explicit ethical charter, and the bank refused. Its own statement is the best evidence in this piece, because the bank explains itself: [opening the account was not prohibited by law, but it carried a concrete risk of secondary sanctions that could compromise the bank's operations and those of its 100,000 clients, through the correspondent banks it relies on to move funds abroad and through the cards it issues on US schemes](https://www.bancaetica.it/banca-etica-chiede-alle-istituzioni-italiane-ed-europee-di-attivarsi-per-rimuovere-le-inaccettabili-sanzioni-usa-a-francesca-albanese/). Secondary sanctions are penalties aimed not at the listed person but at whoever keeps serving her. [The bank's director general later added that even an account opened in defiance would have been useless, since no card could run on it](https://www.avvenire.it/attualita/le-sanzioni-usa-a-francesca-albanese-che-non-puo-aprire-un-conto-corrente%5F94643). The bank had no objection to her. It had an objection to what would happen to itself.

Why should an American decision matter to an Italian bank operating in euro? Because the bank does not live in an Italian bubble. Its customers pay with cards that run on American networks, and its payments abroad pass through other banks with business in the United States. Lose access to either, and the people hurt are the bank's other customers, who have nothing to do with the sanctioned one.

A year later the same bank met the same problem from the other side. An Italian association that had banked with it since 2018 was added to a US list on 26 August 2026\. [By the bank's own account, the relationship had always shown regular activity and had never raised an anti-money-laundering concern, remaining in the medium risk band](https://www.bancaetica.it/area-stampa/autistici-inventati-banca-etica-condanna-uso-improprio-ofac-valutazioni-per-non-chiudere-il-conto/). [On 1 September the bank suspended all operations on the account, on 4 September it withdrew from the contract, and the funds stayed frozen](https://www.byte.it/autistici-inventati-porta-banca-etica-in-tribunale-per-riavere-i-fondi-bloccati-dopo-le-sanzioni-usa/), although the US authorities had themselves allowed existing relationships to be wound down until 25 September. The association has since filed an urgent application before the court of Pisa to have the account reopened; at the time of writing, no decision had been made public.

What makes this case worth reading is not the association but the bank's own explanation. Banca Etica was hardly an institution eager to follow Washington: [in its own public statements it condemned the use of anti-terrorism lists against dissent, and said it was raising its risk rating on the account only because the American decision forced it to](https://www.bancaetica.it/area-stampa/autistici-inventati-banca-etica-condanna-uso-improprio-ofac-valutazioni-per-non-chiudere-il-conto/). And it closed the account anyway, because keeping it would have put at risk the operations of its other 130,000 clients and members and, in the bank's words, its own survival. It asked the banking associations and the Treasury for help, and [it said publicly that a court ruling would give it the cover it needed to release the funds](https://contropiano.org/news/politica-news/2026/09/15/autistici-inventati-presenta-ricorso-verso-banca-etica-non-chiudeteci-il-conto-0198596). A bank asking to be sued so that a judge can order it to do what it says it wants to do: that is the position of the intermediary in the chain, described by the intermediary itself.

Notice the timing. Washington itself had allowed thirty days to wind the relationship down; the bank froze the account in six and withdrew in nine. The sequence is the logic of de-risking, a pattern common enough that European supervisors have written guidelines against it: when the intermediary bears the consequences of getting the decision wrong, it acts earlier and harder than the measure itself requires. More royalist than the king, and for a reason the king never had to give.

Three vantage points, then, on one mechanism. An international court, an individual, and the European bank that sits between European law and American leverage. In none of the three did the euro fail. What came under pressure, and for some of them gave way, was access to the infrastructure needed to use it.

## Would a digital euro solve this?

Partly, and the part it solves is real. The European Central Bank is building the digital euro to give Europeans a public digital means of payment that does not depend on non-European card schemes. It would still reach people through banks and other payment providers, not directly from the central bank. [The legislation establishing it has been under negotiation between Parliament and Council since July](https://www.bancaditalia.it/media/notizia/the-european-parliament-decided-to-open-negotiations-on-the-digital-euro-regulation/), and [the ECB plans a twelve-month pilot from the second half of 2027, aiming to be ready for a possible first issuance in 2029](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital%5Feuro/pilot/html/index.en.html). The private side is moving too: on 30 September [five national payment schemes, among them Bancomat, Bizum and Wero, created a joint company to connect their networks for 130 million users across thirteen countries](https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/european-network-for-payments/), explicitly to reduce reliance on Visa and Mastercard. A year ago I wrote that the digital euro needed a real European payment infrastructure around it. That infrastructure is now being built, by public and private hands at once.

Lay the chain over it. The currency, already sovereign. The network, exactly where the digital euro and the new interoperability company act, and a genuine advance. The technology underneath, not addressed by either. The account, still held with the same banks that today apply foreign lists out of prudence. The law, unchanged. The digital euro can Europeanise the rail. It does not automatically Europeanise everything the bank depends on: not the correspondent banks that Banca Etica named alongside the cards, and not the exposure of the bank that gives you access to it. The problem was never simply that the card scheme was American. It was that the institutions serving the judges concluded that going on serving them exposed them to a risk they could not carry.

## The counter-case

Russia faced the same vulnerability and chose a very different answer. Its digital rouble runs on a central-bank platform, [conceived from the start, as the Atlantic Council noted in 2023, as a channel insulated from Western financial leverage](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-is-ramping-up-its-cbdc-will-putins-robot-ruble-work/): [since September 2026 the largest banks have been required to offer it and larger retailers to accept it, with the obligation extending to smaller banks and retailers in stages through 2028, while its use remains voluntary for individuals](https://www.cbr.ru/press/event/?id=25774).

The Union has formally said what that platform is for. [Its twentieth sanctions package, in Council Regulation 2026/506, bans transactions in the digital rouble and any EU support for its development](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:L%5F202600506), effective 24 May 2026\. For the first time, a central bank's digital currency sits on a European list of instruments of circumvention.

Two answers, then, to the same question of who can interrupt a payment. Russia takes the rail inside the state and compels the banks to carry it. Europe keeps an open system, run through banks and under the rule of law, in which blocking a payment requires a legal ground. That choice leaves the bank exposed, and shifts much of the burden onto the law that is supposed to protect it.

Nor is the dividing line the acceptance obligation, which the digital euro will carry too as legal tender. The line is whether political intent can become an executable instruction without passing through law, courts and intermediaries that can say no, and whether the alternatives, cash first of all, remain legally protected and practically usable. Control becomes easier as the possibility of exit disappears.

## What European law actually says

Here the past year produced something the 2025 piece could not have cited. The story starts in Slovenia. In 2017 a bank blocked a man's attempt to pay a bill from his wife's account, saying it had to respect US restrictions. In 2022 he applied in his own name for a basic payment account, the simple account every legal resident of the Union has a right to under a European directive, and the bank refused, because his name was on a US list. He was not under any UN, EU or Slovenian sanction and had never been convicted of anything. He went to court, the court asked Luxembourg, and on 11 June 2026 the Court of Justice answered.

[A foreign list, the Court said, may be a risk factor the bank has to weigh, but it does not by itself allow a refusal. The bank must assess, for that specific customer, whether there is a genuine risk of money laundering or terrorist financing, and may refuse only if it concludes it cannot manage that risk with proportionate measures](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62024CJ0081). The Court added that the limited functions of a basic account reduce that risk in the first place. In plain words: an American list is information, not European law.

The legislation now being negotiated builds access to basic digital-euro services on this existing framework for basic accounts. If that architecture survives the trilogue, the judgment will matter for the digital euro too: on the legislation as it currently stands, read together with the judgment, a consumer could not be denied basic digital-euro services merely for appearing on a US list.

That is a stronger position than most people assume Europe holds. Now look at what it does not cover.

It covers consumers. An association, a company, an international court are not consumers, and the right to a basic account does not extend to them. The three cases above sit exactly on that line: the individual is protected on paper, the bank's other clients are not, the institution least of all.

It covers refusing to open an account. The Banca Etica case was the suspension of a relationship that had lasted eight years, on an ordinary account, ended by the bank withdrawing from the contract, which is different legal terrain from the right to a basic account.

And it covers one kind of risk. The Court reasons entirely about the risk that the customer launders money or finances terrorism. The risk Banca Etica described was not that. It was the risk to the bank itself: to its cards, to its correspondent banks, to the 130,000 people who had nothing to do with the case. That is not the kind of risk the Court recognised as sufficient, by itself, to deny a basic account, which protects the customer. Nothing in the judgment takes that risk off the bank either. And here is the gap. The Court protects the customer from the bank. It does not protect the bank from the consequences of protecting the customer.

Europe already has a legal tool designed for exactly this kind of conflict. The Blocking Statute, in force since 1996, tells European operators not to comply with foreign sanctions that the Union considers unlawfully extraterritorial. But only the foreign laws listed in its annex count, and [that annex, by the Commission's own description, currently covers US measures concerning Cuba and Iran](https://finance.ec.europa.eu/eu-and-world/open-strategic-autonomy/extraterritoriality-blocking-statute%5Fen). Not one of the three cases in this piece is there, [and whether the statute could shield the ICC at all is unclear, since the court is an international body rather than a European one](https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/netherlands-bracing-potentially-devastating-us-sanctions-icc-136616246).

So the chain, read through the law, looks like this. European money, by treaty. A European right of access, by directive and now by judgment, which the bank cannot deny merely because Washington has put a name on a list. And foreign leverage over that bank, which European law knows how to resist in some cases, but not these ones.

## What sovereignty turns out to mean

The question in the title has a less comfortable answer than it seems. It is not enough to ask who owns the rails, as if the matter were settled once they are European. The Banca Etica case shows otherwise: the bank is Italian, the account was in euro, the money never left the country, and the account closed. Dependence survives the nationality of the infrastructure, because it lives in the bank's exposure and in the compliance culture that manages it.

Nor is the answer a new technology. Europe already has rules against banks dropping customers indiscriminately: [the European Banking Authority issued guidelines in 2023 against unwarranted de-risking, and they already cover non-profit organisations and the situations in which the right to a basic account applies](https://www.eba.europa.eu/eba-issues-guidelines-challenge-unwarranted-de-risking-and-safeguard-access-financial-services). What Europe lacks is a general rule for the case in which obeying European law exposes the bank itself to coercion from outside Europe, and that is the case all three stories describe. With the Blocking Statute, Europe has already accepted the principle that there are circumstances in which foreign sanctions should not dictate the conduct of European operators. The unresolved political question is how far it is willing to extend that principle.

Last year I wrote that money should remain public infrastructure. I still think so, and the digital euro is the proof that Europe can build it. But the year since has taught me that owning the infrastructure is the condition, not the achievement. Europe already has the pieces of the protection it needs. What it has not yet done is make them meet where the pressure actually lands: on the bank expected to keep the system running.

Sovereignty is not the ownership of the rail. It is the ability to keep the rail running according to your own rules when somebody else wants it switched off.

*The information and views set out in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European institutions.*