Class: ActiveSanction::Sources::UkSanctionsList

Inherits:
Base
  • Object
show all
Extended by:
T::Sig
Defined in:
lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list.rb,
lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list/record.rb,
lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list/published_date.rb

Overview

The UK Sanctions List: every designation made under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, published by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

snapshot = ActiveSanction::Sources[:uk_sanctions_list].new.sync

This is not the OFSI Consolidated List, and that is deliberate

The list this adapter was scoped against -- OFSI's Consolidated List of Asset Freeze Targets, ConList.csv -- was retired on 28 January 2026, when the UK moved every sanctions designation onto one list. Its gov.uk page is marked withdrawn, and the FCDO's own transition guidance says the Consolidated List "is no longer being updated".

The blob it was served from still answers 200. That is the trap: an adapter reading it would look healthy on every sync, download a real file, produce real entities and screen a book of business against a list that stopped moving in January. A stale list that reports itself fresh is the most expensive way this library can fail, so the UK adapter reads the list the UK actually publishes.

OFSI Group IDs are not lost in the move: the FCDO carries the historic one on every designation made before 28 January 2026, and this adapter keeps it in remarks so a hit can still be reconciled against an OFSI licence application or a suspected-breach report. Designations made since carry a UniqueID and nothing else, which is why the Unique ID is what source_ref is built from.

Seven formats, and why this one

https://sanctionslist.fcdo.gov.uk/docs/UK-Sanctions-List.xml

<Designations><Designation>    6,334 records, 21.8 MB

The FCDO publishes the same list seven ways, and two of them are machine-readable at this size: the XML above and a CSV added in January to match the format OFSI's readers had been built against. The CSV is 49.9 MB and 58,424 rows for the same 6,334 designations, because it is a full cartesian product of every repeating group -- one record in it, INU0075, occupies 3,780 rows, being 10 names x 7 addresses x 3 phone numbers x 2 websites x 9 subsidiaries. Reading it means grouping 58,424 rows and then de-duplicating each dimension back out of the product, which is recoverable but is reconstruction rather than parsing. The XML states the same structure directly, in 44% of the bytes, against a published XSD, and it carries a field the CSV has no column for at all.

Conditional GET works here

Unlike the EU's endpoint, this one serves both an ETag and a Last-Modified and honours both: a sync against an unchanged list answers 304 and downloads nothing. Verified against the live endpoint. So the usual run of this source costs one request, and the 21.8 MB is paid only on the days the FCDO republishes.

The two traps in this list

A date component the FCDO does not know is spelled out, not omitted. dd/mm/1962 is a year-only birth date, dd/07/1978 is a month, and 00/00/1975 is one more spelling of the same thing. 824 of the 3,788 published birth dates -- 22% -- carry a placeholder, and every one of them reads as nil through an ordinary date parser. See PublishedDate.

The publisher's own script labels disagree with its own strings. NonLatinScriptType is stated on 2,057 of the 3,856 non-Latin names and agrees with the characters on 2,054 of them -- but three names labelled Cyrillic are Latin transliterations (OAO "STUPINSKAYA METALLURGICHESKAYA KOMPANIYA"), and 185 names filed under <NonLatinName> contain no non-Latin character at all. So script is left unstated on every name here, which is the same call the UN and EU adapters make for the same reason: which script a string is in is a question about its characters, and the normalizer is where that gets answered. The FCDO's label and language are kept in remarks.

What a clean UK result is worth

More than an EU one. The FCDO marks its own primary name -- every one of the 6,334 records carries exactly one NameType of Primary Name, six carry two, and none carries none -- so this adapter never has to guess which spelling is the official one, which is the judgment the EU adapter is stuck making. Alias grading is published as a field rather than as prose, on 2,073 names. Against that, nationality arrives as prose ("Russia", "North Korea"), the way the UN publishes it, and is resolved by Country at scoring time rather than here.

What this adapter does not do

It does not read <CryptoWalletAddresses> or <HullIdentificationNumbers>. The XSD defines both and the FCDO populates neither on any of the 6,334 records published today, and a mapping written against zero records is a guess that gets discovered to be wrong by a user rather than by a test. They are the first things to add when either field appears.

It does not parse PassportAdditionalInformation, which is a sentence ("Afghanistan passport number P04581926, issued on 7 August 2024, issued in Kandahar, Afghanistan (expires 7 August 2034)") carrying an issuing country and two dates that Identifier has members for. Reading it is the same job OFAC's RemarksParser does and wants the same treatment -- a measured coverage figure -- rather than a regex added here in passing. The sentence is kept verbatim on the identifier's note.

Instance Attribute Summary collapse

Attributes inherited from Base

#cache, #fetcher, #instrumenter, #logger

Instance Method Summary collapse

Methods inherited from Base

#authority, #column_shapes, #column_tallies, #file_key, #floors, #format, #fresh?, #inspect, #jurisdiction, #key, #parse_argument, published_remarks, #retrieve, #snapshot, #stale?, #sync, #url, #urls

Methods included from Definition

#authority, #declarations, #declared?, #declared_floors, #declared_urls, #file_key, #floor, #floors, #format, #jurisdiction, #key, key!, #licence_notice, #licence_url, #multi_url?, #to_h, #url, #urls

Constructor Details

#initialize(*args, **options) ⇒ void

Parameters:

  • args (T.untyped)
  • options (T.untyped) 


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# File 'lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list.rb', line 152

def initialize(*args, **options)
  super
  @warnings = T.let([], T::Array[Parsers::Warning])
  @unmapped = T.let([], T::Array[Parsers::Warning])
  @generated_at = T.let(nil, T.nilable(String))
end

Instance Attribute Details

#warnings ⇒ Array<Parsers::Warning> (readonly)

Records that could not be used, and fields that could not be read. Read after #parse; sync orchestration (#34) reports them.

Returns:



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# File 'lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list.rb', line 149

def warnings
  @warnings
end

Instance Method Details

#parse(raw) ⇒ Array<Entity>

Parameters:

  • raw (T.untyped)

Returns:



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# File 'lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list.rb', line 160

def parse(raw)
  reader = LIST.read(raw)
  entities = build(reader)
  @warnings = reader.warnings + @unmapped
  entities
end

#source_version ⇒ String?

07/09/2026 -- the date the FCDO stamps on the document and shows on its own download page, which is the string an examiner asking which version a decision was made against will recognise. Falls back to Last-Modified for a payload handed straight to #snapshot.

Returns:

  • (String, nil) 


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# File 'lib/active_sanction/sources/uk_sanctions_list.rb', line 172

def source_version = @generated_at || super