World lines up to condemn US sanctions on ICC

Muhammad Amin

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu share a pet hate – judges looking over their shoulders – and looked very smug after the US leader this week imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court.

Seventy nine countries Friday condemned the sanctions, saying they support the ICC as a cornerstone of the increasingly tattered and worn principle of “the rule of international law”.

The ICC itself slammed the sanctions and said it “stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world, in all situations before it.”

The order places financial and visa-related sanctions on individuals who help in investigations of US citizens or US allies, as well as their family members.

Sanctions have been imposed for targeting the US and its allies, the order says.

It follows the court issuing arrest warrants last November for Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu, and its former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, over the genocide in Gaza.

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan will be the first individual to be sanctioned by United States President Donald Trump, two sources briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Khan was named in an annex, that has not been made public, to an executive order signed by the US president on Thursday, the news agency reported, citing an ICC official and White House source.

The 79 protesting countries were all signatories of the ICC convention, but that constitutes just two-thirds of the 125 member states signed up to the court. Notable absentees were Australia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Italy.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had earlier on Friday made it clear he supported Trump’s move: “It’s time for Hungary to review what we’re doing in an international organization that is under U.S. sanctions! New winds are blowing in international politics. We call it the Trump-tornado,” Orban said on X.

The Czech and Italian governments have not said why they had not signed the declaration.

The ICC’s host nation, the Netherlands, regretted the sanctions and said it would continue to support the ICC’s work.

“We don’t know the exact impact yet, but it could make the court’s work very hard and possibly impossible in certain areas,” Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof observed.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other EU leaders said Trump was wrong to impose sanctions: “Sanctions are the wrong tool They jeopardize an institution that is supposed to ensure that the dictators of this world cannot simply persecute people and start wars, and that is very important.”

Court officials convened meetings in The Hague on Friday to discuss the implications, a source told Reuters.

The US sanctions include freezing any US assets of targeted persons and barring them and their families from visiting the United States.

It was unclear how quickly the US would name officials sanctioned. During the first Trump administration in 2020, Washington turned its sanctions sights on then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and one of her top aides over an ICC’s investigation into war crimes by American troops in Afghanistan.

The United States, China, Russia and Israel are not members of the ICC.

The court is taking evasive action, paying salaries three months in advance, as it braces for financial blows that could cripple the war crimes tribunal, sources said last month.

In December, the court’s president, Judge Tomoko Akane, warned sanctions would “undermine the court’s operations in all situations and cases, and jeopardize its very existence”.