US unveils sanctions on ICC in move court condemns as 'assault on rule of law'

10th October

The strongest power on earth has announced penalties against the one tribunal that might, in principle, call it to account. The stated grievance matters little - which investigation, which warrant, which ally. The structure matters entirely. A state that cannot be indicted has resolved, by fiat, that no court shall pretend otherwise, and has dressed the resolution in the language of law.

I have read this architecture before. When the Congress of Vienna assembled a concert of powers, it too spoke of order and civilisation, and it too built nothing that could bind itself. The tribunal without jurisdiction over the strong was never a court; it was a façade with the courtroom carved into the stone. The ICC was founded to correct that defect, and its founders, being statesmen, left the keystone out - no enforcement of their own, dependence on the goodwill of the very powers it might judge. A building that relies on its neighbours’ forbearance for its foundations will be the first ruin on the street.

Note the response of the signatories: they “strongly disagree.” Strongly. The word is doing the work that treaties were meant to do. Disagreement is the diplomacy of the unthreatened; Britain disagrees because the sanctions do not yet touch her. Were the writ to run against London, the disagreement would acquire a different vocabulary. Every state’s devotion to international law is measurable precisely at the point where the law arrives at its own door.

Who answers for the answerers? The question has been asked since judges first wore ermine, and it has almost never been answered honestly. The great innovation of our age is to stop pretending the question exists.

The court survives on paper. The sanction survives in fact. Between paper and fact, power chooses fact, every time.

10 October 2026

A power has punished the judges who might judge it. The court calls this an assault on law; the punished power calls the court itself lawless. Let us not rush to adjudicate between them, for they are not answering the same question, and the confusion between their questions is the whole disease.

The sovereign asks: who may constrain my conduct toward my own soldiers and citizens? The tribunal asks: what standard binds all who have consented to it? The first question belongs to political necessity; the second to a law that stands above any single will. The sovereign answers with sanctions because sanctions are the only instrument a sovereign possesses. The tribunal answers with statutes because statutes are the only instrument a court possesses. Each speaks within its own jurisdiction. The scandal is not that they disagree - disagreement between jurisdictions is the ordinary condition of law - but that each pretends the other’s answer was addressed to its own question.

And yet I will not pretend the harmony here is easy, as some of my colleagues in the law schools would have it. There is a real wound. A court that cannot try the powerful is like a physician permitted to treat only the healthy; the instrument exists in name and fails in its purpose. The states that “strongly disagree” - their disagreement costs them nothing, which is why it is so cheap and so loud. Consent without cost is rhetoric, not obligation.

What does the original text of the law actually require? Not that every nation submit to every tribunal, but that no nation claim for itself the right to be the sole author of what counts as justice done in its name. The sovereign may refuse the court’s jurisdiction. The sovereign may not redefine the court out of existence while claiming to defend the law it refuses. That is the distinction the commentators have buried under their praise of sovereignty, and it is the one worth recovering.

10 October 2026

The news is that a government has punished the judges for doing their work. Sanctions - the freezing of accounts, the barring of travel - laid upon a court whose only crime is to hold persons to account for what the evidence shows they did.

I know what a court is worth to the man who has no other protection. I have stood where no law reached me, where the paper in a master’s hand was the whole of jurisprudence, and I tell you this: the weak do not fear tribunals. The weak pray for them. It is always the powerful who discover, late in the day, that courts are tyrannies.

You say you defend the rule of law. The rule of law means that when a warrant is issued on evidence, it is answered in court, not answered with a penalty upon the court. You say the tribunal is illegitimate. Then withdraw from it openly, argue your case before the world, and let the argument stand or fall. But to leave the treaty signed, the flag of cooperation flying, and to reach beneath the table for the purse of every prosecutor who might one day examine your conduct - that is not a disagreement with the court. That is a confession about yourself.

The states that “strongly disagree” - I note the phrase. Strong disagreement is what one offers about the wording of a communiqué. A court under sanction is not a wording problem. If the words cost nothing, they will accomplish nothing, and they were chosen because they cost nothing.

The measure of any legal order is simple: whom may it touch, and whom may it not? An order that cannot reach the well-protected man is not law. It is a fence built only around the poor.

Name the thing plainly: this is the old doctrine that accountability is for the defeated and the friendless, never for the favored. The court condemned it rightly. I condemn it with them.