Trump Sanctions ICC's Chief Judge and Lead Prosecutor Pursuing Netanyahu, Widening Campaign to Shield Israeli Officials

The Trump administration has sanctioned two more senior officials at the International Criminal Court, bringing the total number of jurists targeted to 13, according to human rights lawyer Kenneth Roth writing in the Guardian.

The latest targets are ICC president Tomoko Akane of Japan, the court's chief judge, and Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, a senior ICC trial lawyer. Roth writes that Seye was targeted "evidently" for his role advancing the prosecution of Israeli officials, an inference he draws from the timing and context of the sanctions rather than any explicit statement from Washington.

Sanctions of this kind cut a person off from the international financial system. No credit cards, no bank access, no ability to function in a modern economy. Roth notes this is a tool historically reserved for the world's worst human rights abusers, now being turned against the lawyers and judges who try to prosecute them.

Rubio's sovereignty argument

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended the sanctions as protecting "American sovereignty," objecting specifically to the ICC's ability to prosecute officials whose government never joined the court. Roth argues this framing obscures the real issue: territorial jurisdiction, a long-established principle allowing a country to prosecute crimes committed on its own soil, even by foreigners, or to confer that authority onto the ICC.

The United States rejected this principle at the 1998 Rome conference that created the ICC, and lost the vote 120 to 7. Since then, according to Roth, Washington has selectively embraced the very jurisdiction it now calls illegitimate. Roth points to President Biden calling the ICC's prosecution of Vladimir Putin, over the abduction of Ukrainian children, "justified," and to the late Senator Lindsey Graham orchestrating a unanimous Senate resolution backing that case. Ukraine is an ICC member state; Russia is not, just as Palestine is a member and Israel is not.

The Netanyahu warrants

The ICC issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, charging them with deliberately starving and depriving Palestinian civilians in Gaza. That case rests on the same territorial jurisdiction doctrine the US once accepted for Putin. Roth's argument is that the administration's objection is not to the legal principle itself but to whom it is being applied.

A legal boomerang

Roth raises a pointed legal argument of his own: Article 70 of the Rome Statute criminalizes retaliating against an ICC official for actions taken in their official duties, a provision aimed at obstruction of justice. Roth suggests the sanctions campaign against Akane and Seye could itself meet that definition, theoretically exposing Trump and Rubio to the same court's jurisdiction. This is Roth's legal interpretation, not a determination made by the ICC or any court, and it remains untested.

The broader pattern, as Roth frames it, is an American effort to make the international justice system unusable against US and Israeli officials while preserving it as a tool against adversaries like Russia. Twelve prior ICC officials sanctioned, now 13, is the running tally of that effort.