US Imposes Sanctions on International Criminal Court

The Treasury Ledger and the Courtroom Door

The official statement says the International Criminal Court has no lawful authority over the United States or its allies, and that its proceedings are therefore illegitimate and void. The executive order the White House signed in February 2025 shows something else: a government that believed those proceedings void would have had no reason to freeze anyone’s bank account. The gap between those two documents is the story. A nation does not reach for the instruments it built against cartels and terrorist financiers to answer a court it considers powerless. It reaches for them when it fears the court is not powerless at all.

Consider what the United States did not do. When the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024, a lawful path for contesting them already existed. The Rome Statute permits a state to challenge jurisdiction and admissibility before the judges themselves. Israel used that path; its challenge went to the Appeals Chamber and was returned for further consideration. The argument is pending in the place built to hear it. Washington, which is not a party to the Statute, could have filed observations, supported Israel’s brief, or argued complementarity, the principle that the Court must defer to a state willing and able to investigate its own. Instead it went to the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The strongest case for the sanctions deserves stating plainly, because it is not frivolous. The United States never consented to the Court’s jurisdiction. Neither did Israel. The Court’s authority over Gaza rests on Palestine’s accession, which several governments dispute. A court that reaches nationals of non-member states through the territory of a contested member is, its critics argue, stretching consent past breaking. If that is correct, it is a serious jurisdictional objection, and serious jurisdictional objections are exactly what a pending appeal is for. The sanctions do not advance that argument. They make it unnecessary to win it. That is the discrepancy I ask the reader to hold onto: the official account is a legal claim, but the official action is a financial one, and the action was chosen because it does not have to prevail on the merits.

Look at whom the order names. Not the Court’s reasoning, not its findings of fact, not the evidence in any warrant application, but people. Prosecutor Karim Khan was designated first. In the months that followed, the Treasury added judges, among them Solomy Balungi Bossa, Luz del Carmen Ibanez Carranza, Reine Alapini-Gansou and Beti Hohler, and later further judges and both deputy prosecutors. Each designation is a person entered on the same list that holds narcotics traffickers. A judge whose ruling one disputes can be answered in a brief. A judge whose card is declined at a pharmacy has been answered another way. Reporting has described sanctioned officials losing access to ordinary banking and to email accounts hosted by American companies; the Court’s own staff have had to ask which vendors they may still pay. When the instrument of disagreement is a payment processor, the disagreement was never about law.

There is a dry comedy in the paperwork, and it is instructive. The order declares the Court a threat to American national security. The same Court has no police, no army and no prison of its own; it cannot arrest a single person without a member state’s hands. It is a building in The Hague full of filing cabinets. The most powerful government on earth has determined that those cabinets constitute an emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Either the Court is as weak as its critics say, in which case the emergency is invented, or its records are as dangerous as the sanctions imply, in which case someone has read them.

This has happened before, which is the part the official account prefers to leave scattered. In 2020 the United States sanctioned Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda over the Afghanistan inquiry, which touched American personnel. The next administration lifted those measures in 2021. So the record shows a pattern: the sanctions arrive precisely when an investigation approaches a protected party, and depart when the political weather changes. Law that switches on and off with the occupant of an office is not a jurisdictional principle. It is a lock fitted to one door.

The stakes are not abstract. Every investigator who cannot be paid, every witness-protection contract a vendor declines to renew, every database a cautious firm will no longer host, is a file in Ukraine, Sudan or Myanmar that moves more slowly. Those victims were never part of the quarrel. They are simply standing in the hallway when the lights are cut.

I have no access to the Court’s sealed evidence, and I will not pretend to judge it. I need only the public record to establish the narrower point. A government confident that the Court had no case would have argued in the appeal that is already open. Washington’s lawyers left that courtroom door ajar and went across town to the Treasury, where a clerk entered a judge’s name on a list and her bank, a few days later, sent her a polite letter.