US Sanctions ICC President and Trial Lawyer, Vows to 'Dismantle' the Court Investigating Israel

The United States sanctioned the president of the International Criminal Court and one of its senior trial lawyers on Tuesday, the newest escalation in a year-long campaign the Trump administration says is meant to cripple the court.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against ICC President Tomoko Akane, a Japanese judge, and Abdoulaye Seye, the court's Senegalese senior trial lawyer. Rubio accused them of participating in ICC efforts to "investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction," calling the court "a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational body."

Neither the US nor Israel has ratified the Rome Statute, the 2002 treaty that created the ICC. But 125 countries have, and several have faced US or Israeli military action that the court has scrutinized.

A campaign that started with Netanyahu

The sanctions are not new policy. Trump signed an executive order targeting the ICC in late January 2025, within days of taking office, shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House. Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, Yoav Gallant, had been issued ICC arrest warrants in November 2024 over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza since October 2023, alongside warrants for three Hamas leaders who have since been killed by Israel.

Former ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who sought those warrants, was the first and highest-profile target of US sanctions. He has since left the post after member states voted to remove him over sexual misconduct allegations, which he denies. That departure was unrelated to the sanctions push, but it removed the prosecutor most associated with the Israel case.

The sanctions list has since grown to include three of the court's eight judges, two of Khan's former deputies, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, and three Palestinian human rights organizations. The sanctioned judges have sued the administration.

Rights groups push back

Last week, four US-based organizations, the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute, sued the administration, calling the sanctions "blatantly illegal" and arguing they force groups to curtail human rights and legal work in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments.

In July, Democracy for the Arab World Now, founded by the late Middle East Eye columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide filed a separate suit in a New York federal court seeking to block enforcement. Rubio had written in an opinion piece that the US intended to dismantle the ICC "brick by brick," a phrase that prompted the filing, according to the groups.

Bensouda's Mossad allegation

The pressure campaign against the court predates Trump. Fatou Bensouda, the ICC's chief prosecutor from 2012 to 2021, told Al Jazeera earlier this year that the former head of Israel's Mossad pressured her in a series of meetings to drop her preliminary examination into the Palestine situation, which she opened in 2015. Bensouda said unidentified men came to her home in The Hague and left an envelope containing $500, a gesture she said she understood as a threat. Occupation Watch could not independently verify the incident beyond Bensouda's account.

Rubio said Tuesday's sanctions were not the last: "The Trump Administration stands ready to take additional measures, if necessary, to systematically dismantle the ICC until it is incapable of threatening American sovereignty."