Judge blocks US sanctions on rights groups helping ICC Gaza war crimes inquiry

A US federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from placing sanctions on two US-based human rights groups for working to help the international criminal court’s (ICC) investigations into war crimes in Gaza.

In a 30-page order issued on Tuesday, Jesse M Furman, a judge at the US district court for the southern district of New York, granted a preliminary injunction to the two groups, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (Taag).

The two organizations sued the Trump administration this summer, challenging an executive order issued in February 2025 that imposed sanctions against the ICC.

The order warned the US government would “impose tangible and significant consequences” on people involved in investigations that Washington said threatened the national security of the US or its allies, including Israel.

The order came after the ICC issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Both men have rejected accusations against them, and the US government also opposed the court’s decision to issue the warrants.

In his opinion, Furman noted that last year two law professors brought a separate lawsuit challenging the 2025 executive order, and that the court had held that the order “violated those plaintiffs’ first amendment rights because it constituted a content-based regulation of their speech-based activities and did not survive strict scrutiny”.

Furman said that this lawsuit brought by Dawn and Taag – groups he described as “American advocacy organizations” – raised a “substantially similar challenge”. He wrote that the groups were challenging the 2025 order on “both statutory and constitutional grounds, re-upping many of the arguments made in the earlier cases”.

Dawn and Taag are rights groups that had worked to gather information for the ICC as it investigated allegations of war crimes against Palestinians.

“The court concludes that the 2025 order likely violates plaintiffs’ first amendment rights because it constitutes a content-based regulation of their speech-based activities and cannot survive strict scrutiny,” Furman wrote.

However, the judge stopped short of declaring the executive order “facially unconstitutional” and rejected the groups’ request to “enjoin the president and to enter a ‘universal’ injunction barring enforcement of the 2025 order against anyone”.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian on the ruling.

The state department also did not immediately respond, but told the New York Times in a statement: “The Trump administration has been clear: the ICC poses an intolerable threat to US sovereignty.”

Joseph Pace, a lawyer for Dawn and Taag, described Tuesday’s decision as “a victory for the first amendment and an important step in unraveling the ICC sanctions regime”.

And in a statement, Omar Shakir, Dawn’s executive director, said: “Today, a US federal court has put the brakes in a major way on the Trump administration’s efforts to shield from justice the Israeli officials who have perpetrated a genocide and their US backers.”

Dawn also said that it would “immediately resume” its advocacy with the ICC “to prosecute Israeli and American perpetrators of grave crimes”.

The ruling comes just days after the US imposed financial sanctions on the ICC.