The EU high-risk third country list

Everything above rests on Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1675, which is made under Article 9(2) of Directive (EU) 2015/849. Article 77 of Directive (EU) 2024/1640 repeals that Directive with effect from 10 July 2027. What happens to the Annex then is discussed at Tracker item 35.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 puts the architecture in three articles instead of one. Article 29 identifies third countries with significant strategic deficiencies and designates them high-risk third countries. The criteria in Article 29(2) include deficiencies of a persistent nature that no measures have been taken, or are being taken, to mitigate. The whole of the enhanced due diligence list in Article 34(4) applies. The delegated act also names specific countermeasures from Article 35. Article 30 identifies third countries with compliance weaknesses, taking as its baseline information on jurisdictions under increased monitoring by international standard setters, and here the delegated act names which of the Article 34(4) measures apply rather than all of them. Both are adopted by delegated act within 20 calendar days of the Commission ascertaining that the criteria are met.

Article 31 is the one with no counterpart in the FATF lists. It lets the Commission identify, in exceptional cases, a third country posing a specific and serious threat to the Union’s financial system where that threat cannot be mitigated under Articles 29 and 30. Which measures follow depends on what the threat amounts to: countermeasures where it amounts to a significant strategic deficiency, specified enhanced due diligence where it amounts to a compliance weakness.

For a firm the practical change is that the question stops being whether a country is listed and becomes which article it is listed under, because the article decides whether every enhanced measure applies or only the ones named in the act. What has not been published is the implementing act allowed by Article 31(9), which would set the methodology for identification under that article and the process for involving Member States and AMLA.