Last year, the email address of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was suspended. Karim Khan couldn’t access his Microsoft account and had to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, the AP reported in May. The suspension came after US President Donald Trump had imposed sanctions against prosecutor Khan by executive order on 6 February 2025. Microsoft’s President Brad Smith denied, however, that the tech giant had stopped the account. The company’s actions “did not in any way involve the cessation of services to the ICC,” he told reporters.
New US sanctions followed, targeting four ICC judges in June, then in August the two deputy-prosecutors and two more judges were picked out, followed by another two judges in December – for handling the Palestine and Afghanistan investigations. This means that US individuals, corporations and groups are “not permitted to provide financial, material, or technological” services to the targeted persons, explains Benjamin Thorne, assistant professor of criminal law at the University of Reading, UK, who also researches the use of tech in international criminal justice – including the ICC’s Office of the prosecutor. If US organizations, such as ‘Big Tech’, partner with sanctioned persons, they risk criminal penalties (twenty years in prison and/or a fine of 1 million dollars) or civil penalties (fines).
“The sanctions have been an eye-opening moment for the court, as well as NGOs and individuals working in the field of justice and accountability, on the level of dependency on US tech and the US financial systems,” says Zoé Paris, advocacy coordinator at the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, that consists of civil society organizations in 150 countries.
The ‘nationality’ of tech providers was not an issue
The ICC uses tech for virtually all daily operations. This dependency is no secret. “We all know about it. As such, this is a not sensitive topic,” says Paris. “But I fully understand it that the court doesn’t share certain information about potentially what service providers they are using. That, indeed, is a sensitive subject,” Paris explains. However, one of the names that always keeps popping up, is that of Microsoft, which Thorne calls “a key technology partner” of the Office of the prosecutor.
Such concerns didn’t play a role when Herman von Hebel became the Court’s registrar in 2013. “The ICC was on its way to increasingly become an e-court and reduce reliance on paper materials. The discussions concentrated on creating an IT infrastructure for the judges, prosecutors and lawyers, to be able to function as efficiently as possible. One of the goals was that they would use digital tools and no longer deal with piles of paper,” he says. Von Hebel explains there was “a struggle” within the court, as the Office of the prosecutor “stressed its sovereignty and wanted its own, separate IT services for its own goals, that didn’t fit the demands of the judges or others”.
A more advanced technological infrastructure required extra investments. But the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) sticked to a policy of “zero growth” for the budget. “I was of the opinion that the ASP was scraping too much, because its attitude was detrimental to the efficiency and IT security of the ICC,” Von Hebel says. Despite the hurdles, the court worked on its digital infrastructure. The “nationality” of the tech company providing services was not yet a topic of discussion, Von Hebel states. One source remembers seeing an overview in 2018 showing the top 5 software solutions used across the court. Three of these were Microsoft products.
A “super ambitious” Office of the prosecutor
In recent years, the Office of the prosecutor proudly announced that it was going for digital tech and artificial intelligence (AI). “It wants to become a world leader in accountability technology,” Thorne says, referring to the office’s Strategic Plan 2023-2025. “The words in the report are over-shouting, overexuberant and also not fully accurate, because the Office of the prosecutor will not develop technology itself. The office will use existing products, systems and services and apply these in their context. Though the specifics could possibly be tailored into something a bit more bespoke for its specific needs and requirements,” he explains.
The Strategic Plan illustrates how “super ambitious” the office is in becoming a forerunner, Thorne says. “Without an up-to-date, reliable, and secure technological infrastructure the Office cannot hope to achieve the full potential of its investigative work,” the organ writes in its 2023 annual report.Prosecutor Khan was thus continuing the policy set out when he was head of the UN’s Investigative team to promote accountability for crimes committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD), which was committed to tech, with Microsoft as an important provider. David Husman, a US tech and investigation expert, who worked at UNITAD, joined him when he moved to the ICC.
Project Harmony
In 2022 the Office of the prosecutor launched ‘Project Harmony’ – co-funded by the European Union. It is portrayed as enabling an “efficient, intelligent and secure evidence management platform”. The objective is to improve “existing infrastructure to collect and preserve data; advancing the Office’s analytical and investigative capabilities; and revolutionising routine and specialised tasks”. It will help personnel “to work smarter, handling large and complex datasets while increasing staff efficiency and reducing human bias”. The Prosecutor’s office explains that for Project Harmony it works with Microsoft (US), Accenture (headquartering in Dublin) and their joint-venture Avanade (with its global headquarter in Seattle, US) which are altogether “providing support in designing and building infrastructure, implementing security measures and change management”.
Project Harmony has three components. First, in 2022, the Office of the prosecutor started to work with RelativityOne, a cloud-based software that allows for safe data storage and provides a platform to manage, review and analyse the evidence. The aim is to assist the staff in “conducting efficient investigations,” according to the annual report. In 2022, the court signed a 5-year contract costing 2.5 million US dollars with Relativity, a US company which is headquartered in Chicago and works in partnership with Microsoft.
Then, OTPLink was launched on 24 May 2023. Stakeholders such as affected communities, witnesses, NGOs and States can use this new online application to submit “quickly, safely, and securely” information about international crimes, also known as “communications”, to the Office of the prosecutor. It “blends the use of advanced modern-day technology and international law,” prosecutor Khan said in a statement. OTPLink, he added, “streamlines the traditional manual review process by allowing the Office to handle larger information volumes utilising AI and Machine Learning (ML) to offer greater insights into the information received, significantly reducing the time required to review and act on it”.
Thirdly, in August 2023, the Office of the prosecutor started working with eVault, a cloud-based solution providing “centralised storage for information and evidence”. The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Through eVault, “analysts, investigators and lawyers can access and manage all electronic evidence collected by the Office,” it writes.
Furthermore, every visitor of the website can see that the ICC as an institution is using US tech products. Courts records and reports published there are in PDF/Adobe, another US enterprise. And as recently as last October, a Microsoft spokesperson told Euractiv, a media network specialized in EU affairs: “We value our relationship with the ICC as a customer and are convinced that nothing impedes our ability to continue providing services to the ICC in the future.”
Weaponizing tech
However, the alleged email-incident revealed by AP served as a stark warning of how digital technology can be “weaponized in furtherance of political objectives, potentially threatening the court’s ability to function according with its independent judicial mandate”, states Jennifer Tridgell, an international lawyer and PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, who has published on the topic. “This incident has precipitated an intense discussion internally about mitigating those deep dependencies,” she tells Justice Info in an interview.
The ICC, which hasn’t responded to questions by Justice Info, is tight-lipped about the effect of the current sanctions on its use of tech. But it’s obvious that the US measures have been causing many challenges. “Some stem from the fact that by design part of the intentions of the sanctions is to sow the seeds of uncertainty, confusion and panic within the institution. In the beginning a lot of focus of the Office of the prosecutor was around speculating and possible contingency planning, such as what would happen if Microsoft suddenly disengaged with the court,” says Thorne. Reuters reported last year that at the ICC “evidence was being backed up due to fears U.S. tech giant Microsoft would have to stop working with the court”.
Paris, who is preparing a report on sanctions for the Coalition for the ICC, agrees that the measures created bewilderment. “The sanction system is complicated and complex. The terms that are used are very broad. On a daily basis we ask ourselves: What does “material support” and “providing services” exactly mean? The implications are not fully known,” she says. “One of the big impacts is also the diversion of attention of institutions and individuals from their actual work, to assessing the risks of the sanctions and come up with the solutions, in order to keep the operational capacity going.”
Thorne notes that the current sanctions are targeting eleven individuals, rather than the whole institution. “So far, however, the sanctions haven’t stopped US tech companies from engaging with the court. The sanctions make the work more complicated,” he says. In the first few months, the work of the Office of the prosecutor slowed down due to the uncertainties about the possible risks of violating the sanctions. It was reported that some staff were frozen off from complete dossiers. “But the sanctions are not currently stopping investigations. It hasn’t brought the court to a halt,” he states.
Thorns points out that “if additional sanctions against individual court staff continue, this could create a ‘web of sanctions’ making it further challenging for the Office of the prosecutor to know what activities might or might not ‘trip’ the ‘web’”.
Overall uncertainty also increases the risk of overcompliance, where tech companies go further – in taking measures such as cancelling contracts – than the current sanctions actually require.
Court-wide sanctions “will bring things to a halt”
Last September, Reuters reported that Trump considered institution-wide-sanctions against the ICC, forbidding US companies to do business with the court. “That’s a very different scenario. Such sanctions will make it very hard for the court and will bring things to a halt,” says Thorne. A source, quoted on the condition of anonymity, agrees: “Because it is not just the ability to send an email, but also to pay the staff, to run the security of the court, to get catering. Every aspect of its functioning has a digital component these days.”
The threat of court-wide sanctions is still hovering above the ICC. But such a massive attack can also have a backfiring effect. “Some States that are dialoguing with the US are raising the issue of the impact of such sanctions saying: you are going to hurt US companies as well,” a source states. “Businesses are more aware and careful about how the public might perceive them, particularly related to human rights and justice, if they pull out their services and impact the functioning of a court,” Paris says.
Digital Independence
As host state, The Netherlands have a special responsibility. One of its activities is talking to the “relevant service providers” to “prevent overcompliance”, the ministers of Foreign Affairs, and Justice and Security wrote last December in a briefing to parliament. The Dutch government is also “in close contact” with the ICC about the consequences of the sanctions on the digital infrastructure. The ministers point out that the ICC is supported by States Parties, “strengthening its digital independence,” and has “already taken several concrete steps in this regard”.
On 31 October 2025, the ICC confirmed that it is switching from Microsoft Office to OpenDesk. This open-source software is developed by ZenDis, the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty of the Public Administration. The public company was founded in 2022 by the Interior Ministry of Germany.
Meanwhile, Thorne stresses that the ICC is still working with Microsoft. “There’s a process of moving away from Microsoft. But at what stage the court is in this process, is unclear,” he says. The ICC still has “a long road lying ahead in disentangling its complicated web of software dependencies after its decades of largely relying upon a select few software suppliers,” Tridgell notes.
The sanctions make the problem more pressing for the ICC. But states, the United Nations and other international institutions are also discussing how to achieve digital independence. Three years ago this wasn’t even a topic. “But in the last 1,5 years, since Trump came to power, digital sovereignty is on the top of everyone’s agenda,” Von Hebel says.
