A coalition of legal practitioners and human rights-focused legal organizations from around the globe has mobilized to protect the International Criminal Court (ICC), just days after the U.S. secretary of state publicly outlined plans by the Trump administration to dismantle the international judicial body piece by piece.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the administration’s aggressive stance in both an opinion piece and a video posted to the social platform X, saying the U.S. would deploy every government resource at its disposal and work alongside aligned allies to break down the ICC “brick by brick” if required. His public challenge to the court comes months after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Rubio framed his opposition around claims of U.S. national sovereignty, arguing that the ICC’s attempts to investigate potential wrongdoing by U.S. military and law enforcement personnel represent an unacceptable overreach of the court’s mandate. He claimed that allowing the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over U.S. citizens would undermine core American legal principles, including the right to be tried by a jury of one’s peers under domestic law. In his video address, he went further, accusing the court of waging an ideological war against the U.S. and claiming unelected foreign officials were seeking to control American law and policy. Rubio also stressed that opposition to the court enjoys bipartisan support in the U.S., noting the longstanding U.S. skepticism of the body which was founded in 2002 to prosecute mass atrocities following genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Notably absent from Rubio’s public remarks was any direct reference to the 2024 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who are accused of overseeing mass atrocities in Gaza that have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The ICC also issued parallel arrest warrants for Hamas leaders over their alleged war crimes during the October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel; those leaders have since been assassinated by Israeli forces.
The coalition’s defensive initiative emerged from the Second International Legal Conference, which concluded earlier this week in Istanbul, Turkey. The gathering brought together a diverse multinational group of sitting judges, practicing lawyers, international law scholars, academic experts, and representatives from legal and human rights organizations, all gathered under the official theme “Crimes of the Israeli Occupation in Palestine: Between Legal Accountability and Achieving Justice”.
At the close of the conference, attendees formally launched the International Initiative to Defend the International Criminal Court and Its Judges, anchored by the Istanbul Declaration. In an official statement, the group emphasized that the work of international justice must remain fully independent from competing political interests and power-driven geopolitics. They warned that allowing political pressure to enable impunity for mass atrocities does more than erode the ICC’s credibility—it undermines the entire foundation of the international legal order and creates incentives for future violations of global law.
The new initiative calls on bar associations, university departments of law, individual legal professionals, academic institutions, and civil society groups across every region to sign onto the Istanbul Declaration and join the collective effort. Its core stated goals are threefold: uniting global actors to uphold the rights of the Palestinian people, safeguarding the institutional and judicial independence of the international justice system, and enforcing accountability for serious violations of international law without political selectivity or double standards.