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The Trump administration on Friday sanctioned the International Criminal Court as an institution, a move that drew condemnation from the UN, rights groups and several close US allies.
Getting into it: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US will ban transactions with the court, shutting it out of US banks and tech firms and barring it from using dollars. The Treasury Department gave Americans doing business with the court six months to close it out, with exemptions for things like telecommunications, software and pension payments.
The administration had already sanctioned more than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, and says the court overstepped its authority by going after officials from countries that aren’t members, including Israel. The court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024 over alleged war crimes in Gaza. Neither the US nor Israel has ever joined the court, which was created in 2002 to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity when countries won’t or can’t.
“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.” He warned that if allies don’t join the effort, the US “will continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC, piece by piece.”
The ICC called the sanctions “an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order” and urged its 125 member countries to defend it. The foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands said in a joint statement that they “strongly disagree” with the move, and Belgium called on the European Union to activate a law that would bar businesses in Europe from following the sanctions.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it “a serious blow” to international justice, and German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig pointed out the US was the driving force behind the Nuremberg trials, saying it’s “utterly staggering that the US, of all countries, is now setting out to destroy this idea once and for all.” Netanyahu praised the decision, calling the ICC “a political body that poses a mortal threat to law-abiding democracies.”
