Just days before the United States dropped its bombshell, Osvaldo Zavala Giler delivered a keynote to a Hague cyber security conference.
Wearing his trademark dapper bowtie, the International Criminal Court (ICC) registrar outlined the court’s response to a “serious targeted sophisticated cyberattack” in September 2023, moving from “containment” to “technological and institutional autonomy”. Zavala Giler was talking to tech bros and policy makers, deliberately positioning the court as the canary in the coalmine. “A business impact assessment” following the first round of US sanctions on elected individuals at the ICC in February 2025 “found that approximately 92% of the court’s judicial processes depended directly or indirectly on a US company or a company with a significant US nexus”, he said. The court has since launched the ‘Operation Tech Autonomy’, which “aims to ensure that no single external dependency can prevent the court form carrying out its core functions”. Zavala Giler then called its audience to act for “European investment in technology capacity” and “the immediate activation of the EU blocking statute to protect European companies from extraterritorial effects of US sanctions”.
On Friday October 9, full sanctions were unveiled by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, with a six-month ultimatum: “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC,” he declared. The court responded that this was an “attempt to obstruct the course of justice and prevent the court from doing what it was created to do”.
“Time for States Parties to address fundamental U.S. concerns”
The sanctions came by executive order from US president Donald J. Trump, to order the Department of the Treasury to add the entire court to its “specially designated nationals” list. This move imposes financial punishment on any entity that does business with the ICC.
In the substance, the sanctions are for the whole court but include a “set of general licenses (GLs) authorizing certain transactions involving the ICC to protect U.S. interests.” These provide a 180-day reprieve on “certain activity involving the ICC, including for the maintenance of its operations”. It explicitly includes “IT-related activities, including cloud and software services”, “the ICC pension plan”; and “certain activity related to the ICC detainees”. In the case of the nine persons detained in the detention unit in Scheveningen, the ICC is allowed to continue to use its bank accounts to keep them locked up. For now. But these “maintenance” licenses are “intended to provide time for States Parties to demonstrate meaningful progress on diplomatic and legal resolutions that address fundamental U.S. concerns regarding the ICC”, according to the executive order.
When fully imposed, the sanctions will apply to “transactions by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States” in any of their relations to the ICC. They will apply to “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”.
“An affront to our alliances and our allies”
“It’s an affront to our alliances and our allies, almost all of whom are members of the court and are committed to the values for which the institution stands”, says to Justice Info Beth van Schaack, former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice. Now professor at Stanford, she aggrieved that her country, whose “contributions have been central to building the architecture of international justice” with “the ICC is an essential pillar of that architecture,” is now “attempting to destroy it”.
Van Schaack points out that Washington is using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president power to block transactions and freeze assets of designated persons and entities if there is “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, foreign policy, or the US economy. “They’ve been used against terrorists, suspected terrorists and terrorist organisations, against drug kingpins, against war criminals [such as] Joseph Kony, former leader of the LRA, currently facing an arrest warrant by the ICC”, she says.
These new sanctions were preceded by succeeding rounds of individual sanctions against judges and members of the office of the prosector. Judges who had authorised the investigations into Palestine and Afghanistan were targeted, along – most recently – with the court’s president. And those at the top of the prosecutor’s office most closely associated with the Palestine investigation, which has resulted so far with two public arrest warrants of Benyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, also lost access to US services. In recent months, ICC judges have been openly speaking about the effects of sanctions on their lives – travel, credit cards, online bookings. In parallel Palestinian human rights NGOs have been designated as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese.
“The United States is in a unique position,” notes van Schaack. “Given that so many big international transactions are dollar-denominated and have a pass-through in New York at some point, banks that are in charge of hosting it, even if it’s for seconds, have to comply. Coming up with an alternative, non-dollar-denominated set of vendor relationships, is going to be tricky, and that’s what the six months will be quite interesting for. I don’t want to overstate it and I don’t want to understate it: yes, these are potentially crippling to the court”.
Protection of witnesses and evidence under threat
Van Schaack is concerned about witness protection. “There are vulnerable witnesses that are receiving services through the Rome Statute system,” she says “and those service providers are going to have to really question whether they’re allowed to continue to provide it. Those witnesses are quite vulnerable. All of the court’s evidence that’s being protected now against what we know are intense cyber assaults, who will try and breach the security of the court is going to be incredibly vulnerable when some of these systems are having to be dismantled because vendors may over-comply or may feel like they have to withdraw that relationship in order to stay in compliance with the sanctions order”.
Part of the difficulty points out the former ambassador is the uncertainty around what exactly “assistance to a designated entity” would constitute”. This makes “NGOs and others who might be sharing information with the court in the very difficult position of trying to understand what their potential vulnerability is”. Persons with US nationality who have worked on war crimes cases all their lives and asked not to be named, have also told Justice Info that they have now to be careful because of the secondary effects sanctions.
What will count as support to the Court…
Sara Segneri, international lawyer and partner at Confinum Strategies, has been explaining to concerned NGOs that “gathering evidence, transmitting dossiers, assisting victims or making submissions,” could all “potentially constitute providing services or material support to the Court”. She also points out that “workarounds” that may have been deployed in the past to enable a European subsidiary of a US company to take over a contract would be “particularly difficult under this sanctions programme”. In addition, she points out, although a genuinely European company may think itself unaffected, that is not the case. Any “independent European company could face was I would call ‘secondary-designation exposure’,” says Segneri, if they supply services to the ICC. A risk that is also “likely to encourage substantial over-compliance by multinational companies,” she concludes.
“The question is, how aggressively is the United States going to enforce sanctions?” muses van Schaack. “You can imagine this administration wanting to make an example of some entity that might try and stay engaged with the court and send a message that they’re serious. In that sense they’re not merely a symbolic effort to strike a blow at the court, but in fact, they may intend to enforce the sanctions aggressively. And entities will have to make the decision about whether a contract with the court is worth potentially invoking the ire of the Trump administration”.
… and what will the US courts say?
There are already several cases within US courts that have provided carveout exceptions for individuals to continue as US citizens to work with the court. Three ICC judges, from Benin, Canada and Uganda filed suit in June 2026 against the sanctions on them. A preliminary injunction was won this week in a case related to engaging on evidence gathering on Palestine. And four NGOs are behind another case going through the southern district of New York courts. “My colleagues and I, former ambassadors at large and also former U.S. chief prosecutors, individuals who’ve held senior positions at international courts over the years, did write a brief in support,” says the former ambassador, arguing that “this is in violation of the global rule of law and that the norms that the United States has been promoting historically through its human rights work now are being violated by this very sanctions order.” “It’s almost more powerful now that sanctions have been issued against the entire institution”, she adds.
An ultimatum or an open door for diplomacy?
Since the sanctions order was issued, there was a wave of immediate diplomatic reaction. The ICC body representing states members of the court, the Bureau of the Assembly of States parties, “regrets” and “calls for the immediate revocation of these sanctions”.
In a joint statement, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom expressed strong disagreement with the U.S. sanctions. “We will continue to work together to support the court’s vital work, uphold the rules-based international system, and advance accountability,” they stated.
But the 180-day grace period before full imposition was seized on by some as a door opened to diplomacy. While the European Commission described US sanctions against the ICC as “deeply regrettable” and said the EU was “ready to take any necessary measures to enable the court to carry out its work”, it added that it hoped the six-month delay meant “there is room for dialogue”. The EU high representative Kaja Kallas echoed a similar wish to negotiate. And Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, while asserting to “do whatever we need to defend the ICC,” also suggested that it was “crucial” that the sanctions do not take effect immediately, because that would provide room for dialogue with the American government.
“I fear that that is somewhat overly optimistic. Many others that have interacted with this administration in the past have learned that there’s very little to negotiate. There’s little to appease. States may try and make some concessions toward this administration, in many respects, potentially sacrificing their values or dignity in the process, only to find that this administration doesn’t budge. And if anything, it may throw them under a bus further,” says van Schaack.
Much of the diplomatic pressure now on the EU, UK and Canada as the court’s major supporters is to deploy a legal instrument known as a “blocking mechanism”, which counters another country’s sanctions by telling European firms they would face fines in they comply. Diplomats in The Hague have told Justice Info that all the mechanisms are in place and agreed. Van Schaack is hopeful it means that “the states that have invested so much time, energy, resources, diplomatic activity, in creating this court, actually step up and defend it. We’ve seen in the past when different countries and configurations of countries stand up to the Trump administration, it can sometimes back down and some sort of a modus vivendi can be reached.”
