A coalition of four prominent U.S.-based human rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit against the second Trump administration on Tuesday, challenging the legality of sweeping sanctions imposed on the International Criminal Court (ICC) earlier this year. The plaintiffs — the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute — argue the executive order sanctioning the court and anyone associated with its investigations is blatantly illegal, and violates core constitutional protections enshrined in U.S. law.
The legal challenge alleges that the sanctions regime forces the groups to restrict their human rights and legal advocacy work, directly violating their First and Fifth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Any individual or organization found to have collaborated with ICC investigations or court officials now faces severe legal and financial penalties under the order, creating a chilling effect that has halted critical work on behalf of war crime victims, the groups said.
The controversial sanctions were imposed just days after Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency in late January 2025, when he signed the executive order targeting the ICC over its active investigations into senior Israeli officials accused of war crimes in Gaza. The order specifically named then-ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan as a sanctioned individual. Weeks after the order, Khan was removed from his post via a vote of ICC member states following sexual assault allegations, which he has repeatedly and vehemently denied.
Trump’s executive order came immediately following a White House visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is one of the subjects of the ICC’s investigation. In November 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, and three senior Hamas leaders. All three Hamas leaders have since been killed by Israeli forces during military operations in Gaza.
Under the terms of the order, all non-U.S. individuals and their family members who provide any support to ICC investigations into U.S. citizens or U.S. allies are subject to sweeping sanctions: their assets held within U.S. jurisdictions or the global U.S. dollar-based banking system are frozen, and they are barred from entering the United States.
This new lawsuit marks the second major legal challenge to the Trump administration’s ICC sanctions policy. In July, two other advocacy groups — Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), founded by the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (TAAG) — filed a separate suit in a New York federal court seeking an immediate injunction to halt enforcement of the sanctions. That suit was triggered after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a Wall Street Journal opinion column explicitly stating the administration’s goal to “dismantle the [ICC] brick by brick.”
In their Tuesday statement, the four new plaintiffs emphasized that Trump’s claimed authority for the sanctions rests on a fabricated national emergency with no factual basis. They outlined the direct harm the policy has already inflicted on their work: the sanctions have prevented the groups from continuing or launching core activities, including serving as legal representation for war crime victims, submitting legal and policy briefs to the ICC, collaborating with Palestinian human rights organizations on litigation and advocacy, conducting research into human rights violations, and delivering humanitarian aid to affected communities.
The Trump administration has a long record of targeting groups and officials involved in international legal action against Israel. Last year, the administration imposed sanctions on multiple Palestinian human rights organizations, many of which rely on support from U.S. experts and donors. It also sanctioned unnamed officials from the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization for their work bringing Israeli war crime claims before international courts, with the State Department claiming the officials were “undermining the prospects for peace.”
In his executive order, Trump justified the sanctions by claiming the ICC has “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute, the 2002 treaty that established the ICC based in The Hague. Both countries have consistently opposed the court’s 2021 investigation into alleged Israeli crimes in Palestinian territory, which was opened by former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.
The court gained jurisdiction over the case after the State of Palestine formally acceded to the Rome Statute in 2015, a step that allows the ICC to investigate alleged crimes committed by Israeli individuals in occupied Palestinian territory, including Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Both the U.S. and Israel reject the court’s jurisdiction, arguing they do not recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, and that Israel should be allowed to conduct its own investigations under the complementarity principle outlined in Article 17 of the Rome Statute. Trump’s executive order repeated these claims and labeled the November 2024 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant an abuse of judicial power.
In his widely cited opinion piece last month, Rubio doubled down on the administration’s hostility, arguing that the ICC’s purported oversight of U.S. military and law enforcement operations represents an unacceptable overreach that threatens U.S. sovereignty. He claimed the court was waging a de facto war against the U.S., and noted bipartisan opposition to the court among U.S. policymakers, while avoiding any direct mention of the outstanding arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The ICC was originally founded in 2002 to hold perpetrators accountable for mass atrocities after genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
The Trump administration’s campaign against the ICC has already had ripple effects beyond the Israeli-Palestinian context. Earlier this year, the European Union warned that the U.S. sanctions could severely disrupt all of the court’s ongoing investigations, which currently cover 16 conflict zones around the world including Darfur, Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Myanmar.
Last month, the U.S.-backed interim government of Venezuela formally withdrew from the ICC, a move the State Department publicly praised as a key step forward in U.S.-led efforts to dismantle what it calls the “corrupt and worthless” court. The State Department criticized the ICC’s investigation into former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro — who was seized during a U.S. military incursion into the South American country in January 2026 — claiming it had produced no meaningful results. In its statement on the withdrawal, the State Department repeated U.S. claims that the ICC wastes resources investigating officials from countries with competent domestic judicial systems that never accepted the court’s jurisdiction, calling the court’s actions “blatant overreach, political bias and selective enforcement” that render it uncredible, non-independent, and illegitimate.