Rubio Sanctions ICC's President and a Lawyer for Daring to Exist

What Rubio Actually Said

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the new sanctions Monday, framing them as a response to the ICC's alleged overreach against officials from non-member states. He accused the newly sanctioned individuals of directly engaging in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose governments had not consented to ICC jurisdiction. Which is, to be clear, a description of the court doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Rubio went further, calling the ICC "a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority." He added that the US would "not tolerate its assault on state sovereignty." These are the same talking points the administration has been recycling since Trump's first term, when he told the UN General Assembly the court had "no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority" as far as the US is concerned.

Neither Trump nor the White House had commented on the latest sanctions by the time BBC News published its report. Rubio is apparently running point on the project to dismantle international justice, one sanctions announcement at a time.

Why the US Is Doing This

The original trigger, as BBC News reports, was the ICC's investigations into US military personnel over conduct in Afghanistan, and the court's decision to issue arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over alleged war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu has denied the allegations and accused the court of antisemitism. The Trump administration has been enthusiastically siding with Netanyahu on both counts.

Neither the US nor Israel are members of the ICC. That's the central absurdity here. The US is waging what Rubio himself called, in a July video statement, a war against an institution it never joined, because that institution is investigating people the US would prefer remain uninvestigated. The sanctions include asset freezes, travel bans, and restrictions on services from US companies, which in practice means any bank with dollar exposure has to freeze these people out of the global financial system.

Last month, BBC News reports, Rubio called on all 125 ICC member countries to withdraw from the court entirely, as part of what he described as a campaign to dismantle it "brick by brick." A US official ominously noted that Washington would "watch with interest" which countries complied. That's a threat dressed up as a press briefing.

The People Fighting Back

This is not going unchallenged. As BBC News reports, three ICC judges, Kimberly Prost of Canada, Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, and Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, filed suit in a New York federal court in June, arguing the sanctions were unlawful and designed to punish and coerce them for doing their jobs. A White House official responded by pointing to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as the legal authority. Whether IEEPA gives a president the power to kneecap a multinational war crimes tribunal is, charitably, an open question.

Four major US human rights organizations have also sued the administration over the whole campaign, calling it unconstitutional. Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Institute, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Center for Constitutional Rights argue the sanctions prevent them from working with the ICC on genocide and war crimes cases. Liz Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, put it simply during a press conference last week, as BBC News notes: "The Trump administration seeks a get-out-of-jail-free card for whomever it chooses."

That line is not an editorial flourish. That is a precise legal and moral description of what these sanctions accomplish.

A Court Built to Survive This

The ICC was established in 2002 and is backed by more than 120 member countries. It has jurisdiction to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, either in member states or when situations are referred by the UN Security Council. It was specifically designed with the assumption that powerful governments would resist it. The founders just probably did not picture the resistance taking the form of sanctioning the court's president.

The institution has not commented on the latest round of sanctions, per BBC News. What is there to say, really. The US has now sanctioned its president, its chief prosecutor, nine of its judges, and a senior trial lawyer. The administration has publicly called for the court's dissolution. At some point the escalation itself becomes the story.