Trump sanctions on ICC personnel threaten prosecutions of war crimes, genocide

In the city of Gulu, northern Uganda, residents gathered in September to hear criminal charges read aloud against Joseph Kony, the warlord who spent decades terrorizing the region through abduction and murder. The prosecutor delivering those charges stood thousands of miles away, in The Hague, at the International Criminal Court. Kony himself was not present. He remains at large, despite a six-year hunt by U.S. Special Forces. Nancy Akello, abducted by Kony's forces at age twelve, sat in that courtroom hoping he might hear the charges and turn himself in. "If our voices reach Kony where he is, he should listen humbly and return home," she said through a translator.

The ICC exists precisely for moments like this—when national courts cannot or will not prosecute the world's gravest crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes. More than 120 countries recognize its authority. The United States does not, fearing the court might one day prosecute Americans. Yet American citizens work there anyway, as prosecutors, investigators, and human rights advocates. They have been essential to the court's work. But this year, that changed.

In June, the Trump administration imposed economic sanctions on nine ICC personnel: six judges, two deputy prosecutors, and the chief prosecutor himself. The stated reason was that the court had abused its power by indicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for alleged crimes in Gaza. The sanctions were unprecedented in their scope and severity. Microsoft cut off the chief prosecutor's email, likely fearing Treasury Department fines. His bank accounts froze. The court's operations began to seize up. Matthew Smith, who runs an organization investigating atrocities including the brutal attacks on Myanmar's Rohingya minority, was about to bring new evidence to the ICC when the sanctions hit—testimony from a defected Myanmar military officer who had witnessed the 2017 genocidal attacks firsthand. "If we can't speak freely, we can't do any of our work," Smith said. He filed a federal lawsuit in Maine, arguing the sanctions violated his First Amendment rights. He also faced potential penalties of up to one million dollars in fines and twenty years in prison simply for assisting the court.

Akila Radhakrishnan, a lawyer facilitating gender-based violence cases at the ICC, found her work with Afghan women seeking justice brought to a halt. She had been in The Hague in December with a group of Afghan women. Now she could not continue that work. "You have to wonder how this is not going to cause paralysis across the entirety of the system," she said. Within the court, the impact was immediate and demoralizing. The top investigator in the Gaza case quit, citing concerns about his children who live in the United States. Others sought waivers from the Treasury Department to continue working, but remained barred from the Gaza cases altogether. The uncertainty was paralyzing. Did providing research for legal briefs constitute "material support" to a sanctioned individual? No one knew. The Trump administration had not clarified the boundaries, and the penalties for crossing them were severe.

The court's track record had already drawn criticism. Since its creation in 2002, it had convicted relatively few defendants despite vast expenditures of time and money. It had been accused of focusing disproportionately on African cases. Yet for victims, the court remained a court of last resort. Molly Quell, who covers the ICC for the Associated Press, noted that despite the institution's flaws, "what victims want is some sort of justice. They want to feel that the wrongs that have been done to them are going to be punished in some ways." The U.S. had historically supported the court when it aligned with American foreign policy interests and opposed it when it did not. Now, with the indictments of Netanyahu and the investigation into American military conduct in Afghanistan, the court had become an adversary.

At a United Nations meeting in July, the State Department's legal adviser suggested that broader sanctions could follow if the ICC did not terminate its actions against the United States and Israel. The assembly of ICC member states responded that the court had acted within its legal mandate and could not reverse charges already filed. But the damage was accumulating. Cases involving Myanmar's genocide, Afghanistan's gender-based violence crisis, and Uganda's decades-old insurgency were all caught in the crossfire. Back in Gulu, the charges against Kony could not advance to trial without his capture—a prospect that seemed increasingly distant. Yet even this small step, the act of being heard, mattered to survivors. "The fact that they're already being heard and people are getting to know what they went through, this is already justice," said Raphael Okot, a social worker in the community. Whether the ICC could continue to deliver even that much remained uncertain.