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This article provides background legal information on the problems of judicial review of EU external sanctions before the CJEU. It does so from two perspectives. First, the article discusses the general problems of judicial review of international (external) sanctions, hiding under the ambivalent label of “restrictive measures”; here, the legal problems arise mainly from the fact that EU secondary sanctions acts fall under both the CFSP and other EU policies, the two EU policy areas being relatively autonomous in terms of the types of secondary acts and their adoption. The article then analyses the human rights dimension of this judicial review; this is because certain fundamental rights (in particular the right to a defence and the right to effective remedy) place considerable demands on the procedural and evidentiary aspects of this judicial review in a situation where much of the evidence relies on classified intelligence information. The scope of the article allows the author to provide only an introduction to the issues discussed.