ICC decries latest US sanctions as ‘flagrant attack’ on court’s independence

The international criminal court on Wednesday condemned the latest US sanctions targeting senior ICC staff, including its president, as a “flagrant attack” on the global tribunal’s independence and vowed to continue seeking justice for atrocities around the world.

The state department announced on Tuesday that it had hit the ICC president, Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and ICC senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, who is from Senegal, with sanctions that freeze any assets they have in US jurisdictions or come into contact with the US financial system.

The Trump administration has now slapped sanctions on nine of the ICC’s 18 judges, both of its deputy prosecutors, its former chief prosecutor and one other prosecution office staffer, the court said. The US accuses the court of overstepping its mandate by investigating and seeking to prosecute senior military and political officials from countries, such as Israel and the United States, that are not members of the court.

In a statement, the court said that when “judicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk”. It said the court “will continue to fully discharge its mandate with independence and impartiality”.

In a statement on Tuesday, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, called the ICC “a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”.

The move came weeks after Rubio announced that the US was launching a “sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the international criminal court to US sovereignty.”

Rubio said he would pressure the court’s 125 member states to withdraw from the institution, sanction organizations that work with the court and ban staff from traveling to the United States.

Since then, Venezuela and Chad have announced they plan to leave the court, bringing the number of countries to pull out of the court in the past year to five. It takes a year for a country’s decision to quit the court to be formalized.

The sanctions can affect the daily lives of court officials. They prevent the ICC officials and their families from entering the United Statesand block their access to even basic financial services, making even going to a grocery store difficult.

The Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, who was sanctioned last year, lost access to her credit cards, and Amazon’s Alexa stopped responding to her. “Your whole world is restricted,” she told the Associated Press after she was targeted.

The court’s oversight body, the assembly of states parties, called the sanctions an “escalation” that “risks undermining ongoing investigations and impeding global efforts” to ensure justice reaches victims of global atrocities.

Japan also criticized the US move.

“The announced measures are very unfortunate,” Toshihiro Kitamura, press secretary at Japan’s foreign ministry, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Japan had consistently supported the ICC in its efforts to prosecute and punish the most serious crimes of concern to the international community and to uphold the rule of law, he said. “Japan will remain committed to strengthening the rule of law in the international community, while maintaining communication with related countries.”

Yuichiro Tamaki, leader of the Japanese opposition Democratic Party for the People, wrote on X that Trump’s sanctions were “outrageous and intolerable”. He urged the government of the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, to show its support for the ICC and reach out to the US government to “have it retract this unjust sanction”.

Balkees Jarrah, Middle East and north Africa director at Human Rights Watch, called the sanctions “the latest example of the Trump administration’s utter contempt for international law and a naked attempt to shield American and Israeli officials implicated in serious crimes from justice”.

Human Rights Watch and three other groups sued the Trump administration last week to challenge its campaign against the ICC. The complaint, filed in the southern district of New York, said Trump’s executive order last year targeting The Hague-based criminal court and the US sanctions issued against a UN human rights expert and three Palestinian rights groups represent a “blatantly illegal attack on international justice and should be struck down”, according to a press release.