US President Donald Trump has prepared sanctions against the International Criminal Court as an institution, rather than against its officials one at a time, and declared that a final decision could come during the week of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The court, seated in The Hague and created by the Rome Statute in 2002, tries individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression when national courts will not or cannot do so. Reuters reported the same plan that day, citing two people familiar with it. Under the measures described to both news organisations, US citizens and US companies would be barred from providing the court with funds, goods or services unless the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the sanctions unit of the US Treasury Department, granted them a licence. Both reports put the grace period before the ban takes hold at six to seven months.
Executive Order 14203, which Trump signed on 6 February 2025, declared a national emergency over the court. Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the order lets the Treasury Department block property and prohibit the provision of any service to a designated person, with criminal penalties of up to 20 years in prison. The Office of Foreign Assets Control wrote the implementing rules into Title 31, Part 528 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Designating the court itself would put the institution on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, the sanctions list that banks screen against. Reuters reported that banks dependent on access to the US financial system routinely refuse business with listed parties rather than apply for licences.
Tomoko Akane, a Japanese judge who is president of the International Criminal Court, and Osvaldo Zavala Giler, the court's registrar, have told the Assembly of States Parties, the body of member governments that funds and oversees the court, what an institution-wide designation would reach: contracts for computer systems, insurance cover, the hiring of investigators and the monthly pay of dozens of American staff. Akane told an Assembly session that the court "is being threatened with draconian economic sanctions from institutions of another permanent member of the Security Council as if it was a terrorist organisation".
Karim Ahmad Khan, the British barrister who was then the court's chief prosecutor, was the first person designated under the order, on 13 February 2025. Four judges followed on 5 June 2025: Beti Hohler of Slovenia, Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza of Peru and Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda. On 20 August 2025 the Treasury Department designated two more judges, Kimberly Prost of Canada and Nicolas Guillou of France, along with the court's two deputy prosecutors, Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal. Judges Gocha Lordkipanidze of Georgia and Erdenebalsuren Damdin of Mongolia were designated on 18 December 2025. Akane and Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese senior trial lawyer in the Office of the Prosecutor, were designated on 18 August 2026. Nine of the court's 18 judges, both deputy prosecutors and the former chief prosecutor are now on the US sanctions list, 13 court officials in all. UN special rapporteurs put the number of court personnel under sanction at 11 in a statement of 28 August 2026. The Office of Foreign Assets Control removed Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, from the list on 20 May 2026 and designated her again on 27 May 2026. General Licence 12, issued on 18 August 2026, authorises the winding down of transactions with the people blocked that day.
The Assembly of States Parties voted on 24 July 2026 to remove Karim Khan from the post of chief prosecutor for serious misconduct and serious breach of duty, the first removal of a prosecutor in the court's history, with 82 of 125 member governments voting for it after an investigation by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services into allegations by a former aide. Khan's lawyer said the investigation "found no misconduct, including sexual misconduct, against Khan" and said the decision would be challenged. Päivi Kaukoranta, the Finnish diplomat who presides over the Assembly, said the investigation did find evidence supporting the allegations. Deputy prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, both under US sanctions since 20 August 2025, have led the Office of the Prosecutor since Khan took leave in May 2025, and the election of a successor is not expected to finish before 2027.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on 13 July 2026 that the United States would take the court apart "brick by brick, if necessary", and set the argument as a contest between sovereign states and globalism. A State Department press release that week said the administration was ready to "systematically dismantle the ICC until it is incapable of threatening American sovereignty". A State Department official told Reuters the options included travel bans and visa revocations for court officials, wider sanctions on the court and bodies linked to it, pressure on member governments to withdraw, and closer scrutiny of governments that receive US security assistance while declining to reject the court's authority over Americans.
Abdoulaye Sabre Fadoul, the foreign minister of Chad, said his government's decision to leave the court's founding treaty, the Rome Statute, followed a direct request from the US government. "The American side expressed its concerns regarding the functioning of this institution and requested that Chad reconsider," he said.
Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso deposited withdrawal notices with the United Nations secretary-general in June 2026, nine months after announcing the intention in September 2025 and accusing the court of selective justice. Venezuela deposited its notice on 24 July 2026 and Chad on 27 July 2026. A withdrawal takes effect one year after the notice is deposited. Nine of the court's 13 active investigations concern African states. Membership stands at 125 governments, and the United States has never been one of them.
The Russian cases
Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on 17 March 2023 for Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian presidential commissioner for children's rights, for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children out of occupied Ukraine, under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute. Ukrainian authorities have counted more than 16,000 suspected cases of forcibly transferred children. The warrant for Putin was the first the court has issued against the leader of a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Pre-Trial Chamber II issued further warrants on 5 March 2024 for Viktor Sokolov, then commander of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, and Sergey Kobylash, commander of Russian long-range aviation, and on 24 June 2024 for Sergei Shoigu, then the Russian defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, for directing attacks on civilian objects and for inhumane acts as a crime against humanity, in strikes on Ukraine's electricity network. Prosecutors at the court said in December 2025 that the warrant for Putin would stand even if peace talks led by the United States produced an amnesty in Ukraine.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine verified 15,172 civilians killed and 41,378 injured between 24 February 2022 and 31 January 2026, among them 438 children. Civilian deaths have risen since: 2,222 people were killed and 13,058 injured in the first eight months of 2026, 55 per cent more than in the same period of 2025, with 372 killed and 2,349 injured in August 2026 alone. The mission verified 182 civilians executed in areas controlled by Russian authorities and at least 109 Ukrainian prisoners of war executed, along with at least 30 Russian prisoners of war executed by Ukrainian forces. Of 725 released Ukrainian prisoners of war the mission interviewed, 697 gave accounts of torture or ill-treatment, as did 321 of 380 civilians detained by Russia.
Rape, gang rape, genital mutilation and electric shocks to the genitals appear across 1,004 cases the UN Human Rights Office counted between 24 February 2022 and 31 July 2026 in a report published on 18 September 2026. It attributed 89 per cent of the cases to Russian authorities and 11 per cent to Ukrainian authorities. Most of the victims were men held in detention, with women and children attacked mainly in occupied territory. The youngest was four years old and the oldest 82. Of the prisoners of war whose cases the office counted, 155, or 27 per cent, were given electric shocks to the genitals at least once, often with Soviet-era field telephones known as tapik. Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said: "Sexual violence is a grave feature of the full-scale armed attack. It must stop immediately, irrespective of the perpetrators."
Moscow City Court convicted Khan and eight judges of the International Criminal Court in absentia on 12 December 2025 of unlawfully prosecuting Russian citizens, sentencing Khan to 15 years and the others to terms of three and a half to 15 years. United Nations special rapporteurs said the convictions "are legally null and void under international law" and placed them in a pattern of reprisals against critics of the war in Ukraine. The AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, stopped an officer of Russian military intelligence from taking an internship at the court in 2022 on a false Brazilian identity.
The Israeli and Hamas cases
Pre-Trial Chamber I issued arrest warrants on 21 November 2024 for Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, his defence minister at the time, for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for murder, persecution and other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity in Gaza. The chamber found reasonable grounds to believe the two had intentionally deprived Gaza's civilian population of food, water and medicine, that doctors had operated and amputated limbs, including on children, without anaesthetic, and that the restrictions created conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population, with deaths from malnutrition and dehydration. Netanyahu's office rejected the accusations as antisemitic. The Israeli foreign ministry said of a later ruling: "This is what politics in the guise of 'international law' looks like."
The Appeals Chamber rejected Israel's challenge to the court's jurisdiction on 15 December 2025 and left both warrants in force. Netanyahu and Gallant deny the charges, and the Israeli government says the war in Gaza was fought lawfully to recover hostages and defeat Hamas.
Gaza's health ministry counted 74,582 Palestinians killed as of 12 August 2026. A study published by the Max Planck Institute in November 2025 estimated that children under 15 accounted for 27 per cent of violent deaths and women for a further 24 per cent, slightly more than half the total between them. Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023 killed 1,195 people in Israel, 828 of them civilians.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found on 16 September 2025 that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. Its report of 23 June 2026 found that Israeli forces and authorities deliberately targeted Palestinian children, amounting to genocide in Gaza, crimes against humanity in Gaza and war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and found arrest, torture and sexual violence in detention, strikes on maternity and neonatal care centres, and starvation under blockade. Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chairs the commission, said: "The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces."
The same commission reported on 13 March 2025 that Israeli forces had raped and sexually assaulted Palestinian detainees, inflicted violence on their genitals, threatened rape, and made forced stripping and nudity a standard practice, and that some of the acts were committed under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement from Israeli leaders. Navi Pillay, who chaired the commission then, said: "The evidence collected reveals a deplorable increase in sexual and gender-based violence. Israel has employed such violence to terrorize Palestinians." The report also found the destruction of reproductive health care in Gaza and deaths in pregnancy and childbirth caused by denial of care, which it treated as genocidal acts through the prevention of births.
UN special rapporteurs and working group members said on 30 April 2026 that Israeli forces and settlers commit rape and other sexual violence against Palestinians in detention facilities, at checkpoints and during house raids, and that the practices may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to forcible transfer.
Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, reported on 4 March 2024 reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape were committed in at least three places during the attacks of 7 October 2023, at the Nova music festival site, on Road 232 and at Kibbutz Re'im, with victims in most of those incidents killed after being raped and at least two cases involving the rape of corpses. Her mission found clear and convincing information that hostages held in Gaza had been raped and subjected to sexualised torture.
Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas's military wing, was the subject of a warrant issued the same day as those for Netanyahu and Gallant, for murder, torture, hostage-taking, rape and other sexual violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity in the attack of 7 October 2023. Deif was killed in the Israeli air strike on al-Mawasi of 13 July 2024, which Israel announced on 1 August 2024 and Hamas confirmed six months later, and the court cancelled the warrant in February 2025. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas political bureau, was killed in Tehran on 31 July 2024 and Yahya Sinwar, who led Hamas in Gaza, was killed by Israeli forces in Rafah on 16 October 2024; the prosecutor withdrew the applications against both after their deaths.
The US cases
The Appeals Chamber authorised a formal investigation into Afghanistan in 2020 covering the Taliban, the Islamic State Khorasan Province, Afghan government forces and US military and CIA personnel accused of torture of detainees. Khan narrowed the inquiry in 2021 to the Taliban and Islamic State, deprioritising the part concerning US conduct, which remains formally open. Judges of Pre-Trial Chamber II ordered in August 2026 that the Taliban case be split into a standalone investigation into the persecution of women, separating it from the file that covers US nationals. Warrants had been issued in July 2025 against Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban leader, and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, its chief justice. Shaharzad Akbar, the former head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the split was "deeply troubling" and risked selective justice. Rubio cited the Afghanistan investigation as grounds for the campaign against the court.
Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, told a meeting in Panama on 12 August 2026 that the court might investigate US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, called any assertion of jurisdiction a "lawless power grab" and said Latin American governments should leave the court. "Our efforts in this effort are 100 per cent lawful under the laws of armed conflict," he said. The Washington Office on Latin America counted at least 221 people killed in the strikes since September 2025.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the court's first chief prosecutor, said the people killed on the boats were civilians in law whatever their conduct. "These are criminals, not soldiers. Criminals are civilians," he said. "A crime against humanity is a systematic attack against a civilian population, and there is no clarity why these people are not civilians, even [though] they could be criminal, and it's clearly systematic." Lawfare published an analysis on 16 December 2025 concluding the strikes amount to crimes against humanity. Dru Brenner-Beck wrote in War on the Rocks on 19 January 2026 that article 12(2)(a) of the Rome Statute extends a member state's territorial jurisdiction to crimes committed aboard vessels registered to it, so Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador could each refer strikes on their vessels to the prosecutor, and that US nationals can be held liable whether or not the United States ratified the treaty.
What the court and its member governments say
Seventy-nine states parties, two-thirds of the membership, signed a joint statement on 7 February 2025 after the first designation under the order, led by Slovenia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Sierra Leone and Vanuatu and including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Brazil and Bangladesh. "Such measures increase the risk of impunity for the most serious crimes and threaten to erode international rule of law," the statement said, and it said sanctions could jeopardise the confidentiality of sensitive information and the safety of victims, witnesses and court officials. Dick Schoof, then the prime minister of the Netherlands, said: "Of course, as the host country, we have a responsibility to guarantee the unhindered functioning of the criminal court at all times."
Balkees Jarrah, the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said the designations of 18 August 2026 were "just the latest example of the Trump administration's utter contempt for international law". Kanae Doi, the organisation's Japan director, said the decision to sanction two more court officials was "an affront to victims around the world".
Päivi Kaukoranta and seven former presidents of the Assembly of States Parties published a joint article on the Just Security website on 4 September 2026. "Efforts to isolate the Court diplomatically are aimed at eroding not only one institution, but confidence in the international legal order itself," they wrote, describing the defence of the court as "about preserving the international legal order as we have built it, as humanity's strongest safeguard against a descent into lawlessness and impunity" and the choice as one "between a world based on the rule of law and one where might decides what is right".
Thirty-nine United Nations special rapporteurs and working group members said on 28 August 2026 that member governments must "take bold and urgent action to protect the Court against unlawful interference". They asked states to withdraw support for the sanctions, activate the European Union blocking statute, ratify and use the Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the International Criminal Court, stop companies in their jurisdictions from over-complying and reconsider the recent withdrawals.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and António Costa, the president of the European Council, said in a joint statement on 19 August 2026: "The ICC helps deliver justice to the victims of some of the world's most horrific crimes. To carry out this essential work, its judges and officials must be able to act independently and without external pressure." Tom Berendsen, the Dutch foreign minister, said his government disapproved of the sanctions, and a German government spokesperson said the court "has held accountable those guilty of the gravest crimes". Iratxe García, who leads the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament, called for the blocking statute to be activated.
The International Criminal Court called the designations of 18 August 2026 "a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution" and said it would continue its work. Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, said the United Nations "considers the ICC a key pillar of international criminal justice and the Secretary-General very much respects its work". Akane described the court as the last bastion of the rule of law in an interview published by the Japan Times on 7 September 2026.
The Hague, the banks and the courts
Officials in the Netherlands, the country that hosts the court, are working out how to keep court staff paid, protect witnesses and keep the detention centre running, according to diplomatic briefings described to the Associated Press. The agency reported on 21 September 2026 that US officials had told their Dutch counterparts the measures could take effect as early as the start of this week. David van Weel, the Dutch minister of justice and security, said the Netherlands cannot carry the problem alone.
Regulation 2271/96, the European Union's blocking statute, bars companies in the bloc from complying with listed US measures that reach outside US territory, and the European Commission last activated it in 2018 over US sanctions on Iran. Its protection stops at the bloc's borders. ING, Rabobank and ABN AMRO, the three largest Dutch banks, all have US exposure, which leaves them answerable to both legal systems at once. Analysts at the Atlantic Council, a US research institute, wrote that the European Commission may first press banks to concentrate the court's business in smaller institutions instead of activating the statute.
Court administrators have moved off Microsoft products to German software, shifted insurance and financial services away from US providers and asked the Treasury Department for six months before any designation takes effect. The Assembly of States Parties approved a 2026 budget of 195 million euros, 4.5 per cent above the previous year and below the 202 million euros the court had requested. A cyber attack in 2023 cost the court 3.2 million euros. Investigations are open in 12 countries, with no trial scheduled after December.
Jesse Furman, a judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, permanently blocked enforcement of the order's ban on providing services in Rona v Trump in July 2025, finding it presumptively unconstitutional as a content-based restriction on speech. Nancy Torresen, a judge of the US District Court for the District of Maine, granted a preliminary injunction that month in Smith v Trump, holding that the restriction probably failed even intermediate scrutiny. In a third case, Iverson, the government issued a Treasury licence instead of defending the order. Human Rights Watch and three partner organisations filed a further federal challenge on 11 August 2026 covering sanctions on court personnel, United Nations human rights experts and Palestinian rights groups.
Lindsey Graham, then the Republican senator for South Carolina, said after the court issued the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 that allies helping the court would be sanctioned too. "To any ally, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, if you try to help the ICC, we're going to sanction you," he said. Graham died suddenly on 12 July 2026 at the age of 71 of an aortic dissection.
