Multiple major international news outlets have confirmed that the Trump administration is moving forward with unprecedented, full-institution sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), with a formal announcement expected as early as this week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly high-level meeting in New York. This escalatory step follows earlier US sanctions targeting individual ICC officials, imposed in retaliation for the court’s 2024 issuance of arrest warrants for senior Israeli leaders over alleged war crimes in Gaza.
According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which based its account on internal administration documents and anonymous senior US officials, the proposed sanctions will ban nearly all commercial and financial transactions between US entities and the ICC after a six-to-seven-month grace period. The restrictions will cut the court off from US dollar-denominated financial operations, a move that experts and ICC officials warn could effectively cripple the tribunal’s daily activities. Because most global financial activity relies on the US-led financial system, banks typically over-comply with US sanctions to avoid regulatory penalty, amplifying the damage of the new measures.
Reuters later corroborated the WSJ’s reporting, confirming that full entity sanctions have been fully drafted by the US Treasury Department, though the exact timing of the announcement remains flexible. Under the framework of the sanctions, US citizens and companies will be barred from providing funds, goods, or services to the ICC without explicit approval from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, with only limited exemptions for communications-related transactions.
The ICC has long warned that full institutional sanctions would disrupt nearly every core function of the court: from procuring critical IT infrastructure and insurance coverage, to recruiting new investigative staff, to processing routine payroll for dozens of American employees working with the tribunal. These warnings echo longstanding concerns from international law experts that targeting the ICC as an institution rather than just individual officials would constitute a “doomsday scenario” for the court’s ability to operate.
In response to the looming sanctions, international observers and legal experts have repeatedly called on the European Union to activate its long-dormant Blocking Statute, a regulatory tool designed to shield EU-based entities from the extraterritorial impact of third-country sanctions. If activated, the statute would legally protect EU-based service providers that continue to transact with the ICC, preventing them from being forced to comply with US restrictions that conflict with EU policy. Despite multiple resolutions passed by the European Parliament calling for the statute’s activation in July and September of 2023, the European Commission has yet to trigger the mechanism and has offered no public explanation for the delay.
Sergey Vasiliev, an international law professor at the Open University of the Netherlands and a leading expert on the ICC, has criticized member states and EU institutions for failing to prepare for this escalation despite advance warning of the Trump administration’s intentions. “States Parties have had ample time to prepare for this and undertake contingency planning,” Vasiliev wrote in a post on X. “Everything must be ready to activate the EU Blocking Statute to shield the ICC from US sanctions targeting it as an institution. The EU Commission and all EU member states that considered this measure premature or too radical must now realise that it can no longer be postponed.”
This latest round of planned sanctions is the culmination of a months-long campaign by the Trump administration to dismantle the ICC over its investigations into US and Israeli personnel. Washington first imposed sanctions on individual ICC officials last February, starting with then-chief prosecutor Karim Khan, before expanding penalties to two deputy prosecutors and nine judges leading investigations into Palestine and Afghanistan. In August of this year, sanctions were expanded to include ICC president Tomoko Akane and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye. These individual sanctions have been described as a “financial death penalty” for the affected officials, who have been completely cut off from access to basic global financial services.
In July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the administration’s full agenda in a WSJ opinion piece, announcing a formal US campaign to isolate the ICC globally. Rubio urged all countries to withdraw their membership from the tribunal and warned that Washington would “dismantle it brick by brick” if the court did not alter its activities to align with US demands. Those demands, first revealed by Middle East Eye in December 2023, include requiring the ICC to drop its war crime investigations into Gaza and Afghanistan, and amending the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute, to grant permanent immunity from prosecution to nationals of non-member states such as the United States and Israel. At the ICC’s annual Assembly of States Parties meeting in The Hague last December, member states issued an unprecedented public declaration rejecting these demands and ruled out any amendments to the Rome Statute, without explicitly naming the US.
The ICC’s 2024 arrest warrants, which triggered the current escalation, targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, and three senior Hamas leaders over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. The warrants specifically cited the use of starvation as a deliberate method of warfare against Gaza’s civilian population; all three Hamas leaders named in the warrants have since been killed.
Established in 2002, the ICC is the world’s only permanent international criminal tribunal, mandated to investigate and prosecute the most severe international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. The court currently maintains more than a dozen active investigations into conflict zones across the globe, including Darfur, Libya, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
Multiple US-based human rights organizations have already taken legal action to block the Trump administration’s sanctions, arguing that the measures are blatantly unconstitutional and illegal under US law. Last month, four leading groups — the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute — filed a lawsuit against the administration, arguing that the sanctions force the groups to curtail core human rights and legal work in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The groups note that any individual or organization even loosely associated with ICC cases or officials now faces potential legal repercussions for their work. In July, shortly after Rubio published his op-ed, two additional groups — Democracy for the Arab World Now and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide — filed a separate suit in federal court in New York seeking an injunction to halt the enforcement of sanctions against entities and individuals that work with the ICC. Middle East Eye has reached out to the US State Department for official comment on the planned sanctions, but has not yet received a response.