“What a time to be alive!” is the joking title of a collection of essays published this week on celebrity culture, politics and gossip by UK columnist Marina Hyde. To listen to US president Donald Trump addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 22 – as did your correspondent – for mention of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is to feel that maxim come to life; to note how the US president twists truths and how he bullies his opponents Roman emperor style suggesting he can annihilate civilisations or not with the military machine at his command. The ICC also came in for his ire – he called it “out of control”, a “rogue institution” and an “evil group of people” while exhorting members of the court to leave.
But the full-scale sanctions that have been rumoured have not so far been applied. At the weekend some media reported that Dutch officials had been briefed that institutional sanctions were about to be imposed. The pressure has been ratcheting up over the months, with individual sanctions imposed now on 13 judges and prosecutors including more than half the bench. It looks like Washington has been picking off every individual they could identify who has made decisions on the Palestine and Afghanistan files. Those individual sanctions culminated last month with ones against the court’s president Tomoko Akane of Japan.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio “or his anonymous lieutenants have been leaking the threat of sanctioning the whole court for almost a year now,” says Adam Keith, a human rights advocate who worked ten years for the US state department. “For a long time, they've seen it as the logical next step in escalating the sanctions pressure. They've been sanctioning individual officials, batch by batch, one by one, two by two. And so far, they haven't gotten the results they want. Under a lot of pressure, the judges and the prosecution staff have been resisting a range of demands that included dropping cases that the U.S. government doesn't like. The ICC states parties have also been resisting demands. They have not taken up the U.S. government on its call to amend the court’s rules in a way that would give Trump and U.S. officials, and presumably Russian officials, and presumably Israeli officials, all non-member state nationals, immunity from the court's jurisdiction”.
Dismantling the court “brick by brick”
In his major policy speech last July Rubio declared that the US would tear the court down “brick by brick”. He positioned the court itself as the author of its own demise because of the threat it poses to US national sovereignty and US service personnel via investigations into citizens of non-member states if acting on the territory of a court member. He did not mention the court’s own safeguards where it defers to national courts if there are genuine proceedings for the same actions and conduct. Much of his critique mirrored the early Bush presidency response to the creation of the court a quarter of a century ago in developing the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, and the underlying state department work to get court members make promises that they would not ever transfer an American to The Hague. Former ICC prosecutor Karim Khan looked early on in his tenure to have read the runes, and in one of his first moves, shifted the focus of his office’s Afghanistan investigation to forestall efforts to look into actions of US service personnel in Afghanistan or the connected CIA black sites leading to incarceration in Guantanamo and refocused on the behaviour of the Taliban and the Islamic State-K organization.
What Rubio has also not mentioned and continues not to refer to are the ICC arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, on charges on war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to starvation during the Gaza conflict. It was President Trump who in a seeming aside mentioned the reason for the sanctions on individuals at the court: “Trying to defend Bibi [Netanyahu] and various other people”. And he reportedly asked for support against The Hague from two other permanent members of the UN Security Council – Russia, whose president also faces an ICC arrest, and China which has never been a member of the court.
A growing wave of withdrawals
Beyond the sanctions, Washington also apparently wants to delegitimise the court globally by encouraging states to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the ICC founding treaty. In January 2025 Ukraine changed its constitution and joined the Court, bringing the total membership to 125 states. Since then, five states have publicly turned their backs on The Hague. Out of them, only Chad mentioned that it was following the US line in August. But three other Sahel states – all suspended from the African Union following military coups, all having close ties with Russia – officially withdrew last June: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. In Latin America, Venezuela with its new Trump-installed leadership, after previously railing against the neo-imperialist policies of the court for potentially threatening president Maduro over his human rights record, withdrew in July. Expected to follow are other pro-Trump governments in the region.
“I'm not sure why Rubio chose, mid-July, to revive his campaign or to launch this new part of his pressure campaign,” says Keith. “But if you made me guess, I would speculate that it had to do with the very close-in-time wave of changes of government in Latin America to a very Trump-friendly sort of conservative populist governments. My guess is that Rubio thinks he can peel off, get a number of those states to leave the ICC. But… but we don't know.” The new authorities in Colombia no longer have a candidate put forward to be a judge at the court. Watch out for movement in places like Argentina and El Salvador.
Across the African continent, Ottilia Maungadizde of the Institute for Security Studies Africa suggests that to identify potential candidates for following the US line, “the best place to look is those that have entered into bilateral deals (critical minerals, security, third country repatriations, etc) with the US in and outside of Africa”. There are many, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Guinea, or Zambia.
In Europe, following the electoral defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary that country rescinded Orban’s order to quit the ICC. However, it was reported that the drawbacks to ICC membership were raised by the US at a NATO meeting in Brussels. A diplomat from a small NATO state, who spoke on background, confirmed to Justice Info that they had been lobbied since the European summer with a consistent message calling on them to withdraw. But, they said, no explicit quid pro quo on military assistance had been demanded.
Preparing for wider sanctions
“Right now, we are all in a waiting pattern,” says Mark Kersten of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. “We know this is coming, we’ve known for a long time and wished it wasn’t the case that is happening. Hopefully states have been using this time to prepare.”
Journalists have been told that the main message is ‘resilience’, that the court is ready to weather this storm. While the “court is limited in its capacity to respond to the coercive power of the US,” says Kersten, “it has migrated from Microsoft to a German provider and done other things to prepare. States have been planning for this. There has been quite a lot of warning.”
But while “technology is a major vulnerability,” says Sara Segneri, international lawyer and partner at Confinum Strategies where she focuses on International Criminal Law, Finance, and Sanctions, “banking may be even more immediately disruptive because payments, salaries and vendor contracts can all be affected. Insurance, reinsurance and other essential commercial services could also become difficult as companies de-risk. The interconnectedness of those services is what makes entity-wide designation substantially more consequential than sanctioning individual judges or prosecutors”.
If the ICC is designated as a whole, “U.S. companies would have very little room to continue ordinary services”, she says, but “the impact goes far beyond just the Court and its personnel”. Those “gathering evidence, transmitting dossiers, assisting victims or making submissions could potentially constitute providing services or material support to the Court” – and fall under the sanctions regime.
Chilling effect
“The most significant European legal response would be to expand the EU Blocking Statute,” says Segneri. That’s a mechanism that prevents European companies from simply following American extraterritorial sanctions, but it’s not in place yet. Kersten agrees that “it will be critically important whether UK, Canada and the EU invoke their blocking statutes to prevent companies from having to abide by US sanctions and face punitive measures”. Even though “it’s not a perfect approach,” he notes that “it’s something concrete states can do beyond mere rhetoric to articulate and demonstrate their support for the institution”.
“There also needs to be explicit protection for NGOs, lawyers, investigators, victims' groups, academics and civil-society organisations that gather evidence, transmit information, make Article 15 communications [to the Office of the Prosecutor], file submissions or otherwise cooperate with the ICC,” says Segneri. This is “particularly important,” she says, because the Trump’s 2025 executive order “permits designation of foreign persons that materially assist certain ICC investigations or provide goods or services to blocked persons”. What she is concerned about is that “sanctions could reach beyond the Court itself and create a chilling effect on civil society, lawyers and investigators who cooperate with it, even though they are completely independent of the ICC”.
Kersten wonders how far individuals working at the court would be protected: “Will protections be offered to European or western staff at the court? But what about those who come from elsewhere?” Ultimately, in Segneri’s view, “the effectiveness of any response will depend not only on the law but on whether European banks, technology companies, insurers and other providers are prepared to continue lawful services despite the commercial and sanctions risks associated with U.S. pressure”.
“If these sanctions succeed in crippling the Court,” she concludes, “the consequence is straightforward: victims lose a path to justice, investigations and prosecutions are obstructed, and those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are given greater opportunity to evade trial, accountability and punishment for the atrocities they have committed.”
