“Civil death” was a punishment under ancient French law—abolished in 1854—that extinguished the legal personality of the convicted individual: loss of property, family rights, and civil existence, while leaving the person physically alive. Civil death—cruel, total, annihilating—was believed to belong to a bygone era. The European Union has just reinvented it—and made it worse. The case of Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud, who has been struck with civil death by the EU, first caught my attention. By a sovereign decision dated December 15, 2024, the EU banned Mr. Baud from its territory and “froze” all his assets. However hard I searched,...