Washington’s latest ICC sanctions do not go far enough

The new sanctions the United States has recently imposed on the International Criminal Court are to be welcomed. They build on limited sanctions introduced by President Donald Trump in February 2025, by way of Executive Order 14203, Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, whereby the U.S. administration determined the ICC to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”, and declared “a national emergency to address that threat.” To date the United States has imposed sanctions on 17 persons, ICC judges, prosecutors and officials, pursuant to Executive Order 14203.

With these sanctions, the U.S. administration is defending the concept of sovereignty in the face of a concerted attempt to circumvent democratically elected parliaments and laws by way of the ICC, an ethically, morally and legally flawed court with questionable judges – bearing very little resemblance to a court and judges as understood within Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. The International Criminal Court is a treaty-based international organisation established pursuant to the 1998 Rome Statute and opened its doors in 2002 following ratification by 60 states. Overwhelmingly funded and directed by European Union states, the ICC should be seen as an instrument of European foreign policy, initially focused in Africa (to date it has only ever convicted Africans).

The deeply flawed and poorly drafted Rome Statute has been deliberately reinterpreted by ICC judges, some of whom have never even been lawyers, let alone judges, before sitting on the bench. The supposed cornerstone of the ICC is the principle of complementarity. The Court was designed to be a court of last resort, only acting if a signatory State Party was unable or unwilling to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or wars of aggression within its country. Spurred on by ideological legal scholars, unaccountable non-governmental organisations, political activists and other global court evangelists, ICC prosecutors and judges have sought to circumvent the intentions of the drafters of the Rome Treaty and make the ICC a politically selective court of first instance and not a court of last resort, something the United States and other sceptical countries were promised in the 1998 negotiations that it would never be.

In so doing, the self-styled International Criminal Court and its judicial missionaries have not only ridden roughshod over the Rome Statute, the Court’s own constitutive document, they have also tried to pervert the cornerstone of international law, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The Vienna Convention makes it crystal clear that a state cannot be bound by a treaty it has not consented to, a principle known as pacta tertiis nec nocent nec prosunt (treaties do not create rights or obligations for third states). The US sanctions are the direct result of the ICC’s attempts to illegally impose the Rome Treaty and its putative jurisdiction upon the United States and Israel, countries that pointedly did not sign up to it.

The ICC is the latest, and by far the most beguiling, face of attempts to force gouvernement des juges, government by judges, upon nation states. Who could possibly be against international justice? The answer is anyone and any country not wishing to be ruled by a corrupt and inept Woke NGO masquerading as a court, staffed by sub-par Woke NGO-vetted prosecutors, NGO-vetted judges “elected” by systemically corrupt vote-trading with an appalling and well-documented track record of prosecutorial misconduct (in and out of the courtroom), legal malpractice and evidentiary scandals including hiding exculpatory evidence from the defence.

One ICC Chief Prosecutor clearly did not believe in the presumption of innocence and actually threatened to criminalise anyone who claimed that presumption of innocence in respect of ICC indictees. In a rare moment of lucidity, one of his successors as Chief Prosecutor was candid enough to admit that “[a]round the world, many people are not buying what we are selling.” ICC trials have been described by the pro-ICC Economist as “bumbling,” “chaotic” and “near-farcical”, by the New York Times as “more resembling a circus, if not an outright farce” and by legal bloggers as “slapstick comedy.” ICC-friendly legal scholars have also been candid enough to point out that the court has convicted people of crimes they didn’t commit.

The Rolls-Royce of courts it isn’t.

The new American sanctions introduce measures whereby all property and interests in property of the ICC that are in the United States or in possession or control of U.S. persons are blocked and must be reported to the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Additionally, all transactions by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated or otherwise blocked persons are prohibited unless exempt or authorised by a general or specific license issued by OFAC. The order bans U.S. entities, companies, and individuals from conducting financial transactions with the ICC, cutting off its access to U.S. financial services, technology, and dollar-based transactions. These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Disappointingly, these sanctions come with a “grace period” of 180 days, by way of general licences, authorising certain transactions involving the ICC to allow for maintaining or winding down ICC operations which will enable States Parties’ payments to the ICC, salary payments, health insurance, and medical services for its employees or contractors, and payments for rent, utilities, and routine services. Regrettably, there are concessions for separate licences which may permit the provision of certain IT, telecommunication, cloud and software services, ICC pension plans, and services needed for the benefit of specified ICC detainees. This jars with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s declared aim of dismantling the ICC “brick by brick”. He has left a lot of brickwork in place.

Secretary Rubio has said of the new sanctions that they had been structured to provide time for ICC States Parties to demonstrate meaningful progress on diplomatic and legal resolutions that address fundamental U.S. concerns regarding the ICC and can be adjusted if those concerns were not met. This is a strange decision. It is puzzling that the Trump administration is willing to allow a grace period to any organisation designated as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.

The Trump administration may well be taking the very understandable view that the ICC is a European political project masquerading as a court – which it certainly is – and that it will bend to political pressure. It has done so in the past. Washington may have taken the view that the European Union may not wish to see the billions of dollars it has poured into the ICC wasted as the court is dashed to pieces on the rock of American resolve, and that it will ensure the Court rows back from its global adventurism.

All this soft-soaping should be put aside. Not only should the grace period be revoked, the Trump administration should impose more sanctions. As it stands 17 people at the Court have been sanctioned. Those sanctions should be extended to every one of the Court’s one thousand employees, who should be warned in advance that this will happen. Faced with life without bank accounts, credit cards, PayPal, Microsoft, payroll software, any online subscriptions, play stations, Cloud, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Alexa, Ubers or Uber Eats, online hotel bookings or Airbnb, shopping on Fifth Avenue, holidays at Disney World etc., the Court’s employees may vanish overnight in a flurry of resignations to avoid these ramifications.

Washington must push on. The ICC might survive but will be weakened and discredited, having to pay any remaining staff with wheelbarrow loads of euro banknotes, underwritten as always by the European Union, and looking less and less like the universal legal body at the heart of its pretensions.