Sanctions freeze assets with a heavy hand; court systems often demand money up front just to open the door. What happens when these two logics collide? In C-384/24 (RKDF v Belgium), the Court of Justice (Tenth Chamber) offers a crisp answer: Member State authorities may authorize the release of frozen funds to pay the mandatory fees needed to file a case, provided national law classifies those payments as taxes. The route is Article 4(1)(a) of Regulation 269/2014—read with Article 47 of the EU Charter—not the more familiar carve-out for “legal services” in Article 4(1)(b).
The facts are almost tailor-made to expose the tension. The Russian-Kyrgyz Development Fund (RKDF) had assets frozen under the Russia sanctions regime. It wanted to challenge a Belgian Treasury decision that kept the freeze in place. To lodge the action before the Belgian Council of State, Belgian law required paying a roll fee and a flat-rate contribution. Because the funds were frozen, the RKDF paid late; the case risked being struck off. Belgium argued that sanctions mean what they say: no funds made available. RKDF replied that these upfront payments are taxes under Belgian law—and the sanctions regulation explicitly lets authorities release funds to pay “taxes” when necessary to meet “basic needs.”
The Court begins with a simple but decisive move: it takes “basic needs” seriously as a rights-sensitive concept. If paying a filing fee is a legal precondition to access a court, then allowing a sanctioned entity to pay that fee serves a basic need intimately tied to effective judicial protection. That is where Article 47 of the Charter does real work. It is not that everything becomes “basic”; rather, the Court says these particular payments—when national law imposes them and classifies them as taxes—fall within Article 4(1)(a). In other words: no back door; a narrow, principled front door.
Just as important is what the judgment rejects. The Court refuses to shoehorn filing fees into Article 4(1)(b) (the exception for “reasonable professional fees” and “expenses associated with the provision of legal services”). Filing fees are not the price of legal representation; they are public exactions owed to the court system, payable whether or not a lawyer is involved. Courts do not “provide legal services” to litigants in the sense relevant to 4(1)(b). That matters because mixing the categories would blur the careful structure of the regulation and potentially widen the exception in ways the legislature never wrote.
And what about the fallback clause—Article 4(1)(d) on “extraordinary expenses”? The Court politely sets it aside. Once filing fees qualify as “taxes” under 4(1)(a), there is no need to invoke the extraordinary-expenses pathway. That pathway may still matter in other edge cases, but not here.
Two practical consequences follow.
First, domestic classification is pivotal. The Court expressly ties the 4(1)(a) route to whether national law treats the payments as taxes (or, more broadly, obligatory public contributions). Belgium does. Other Member States vary. That means the same sanctions regulation can yield different operational outcomes across the Union, depending on how each legal system labels its court-access payments. Expect litigants to argue—energetically—that their docket fees wear the “tax” label.
Second, proportionality and precision will govern authorizations. The authorization should cover only the exact sums necessary to keep the case on the roll, paid directly to the competent public account, with full traceability. This is not a thaw; it is a targeted melt—just enough to prevent rights from icing over.
Practitioners now have a clean roadmap. If your client’s funds are frozen and a national filing fee stands between you and the courthouse, start with Article 4(1)(a) plus Article 47. Prove the legal obligation (statute, rule of court, payment notice), prove the classification as a tax under national law, and confine your request to the minimum amount. Do notrely on 4(1)(b) for filing fees; save that for counsel’s fees and case-related disbursements. Keep 4(1)(d) in the toolbox for genuine oddities, but accept that this judgment points you to (a).
The broader message is measured but unmistakable: sanctions are strict, not self-defeating. They cannot be read to bar the very payments that make judicial review possible. When national law says “pay to be heard,” EU law replies: “then authorize just enough payment to be heard.”