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

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.