THE International Criminal Court has condemned the latest US sanctions targeting its senior staff as a “flagrant attack” on the global tribunal’s independence, and vowed to continue seeking justice for atrocities around the world.
The State Department announced on Tuesday that it had hit ICC president Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, from Senegal, with sanctions that freeze any assets they have in US jurisdictions or come into contact with the American financial system.
The Trump administration has now placed sanctions on nine of the ICC’s 18 judges, both of its deputy prosecutors, its former chief prosecutor and one other prosecution office staff member, the court said.
Washington accuses the court of overstepping its mandate by investigating and seeking to prosecute senior military and political officials from countries that are not members of the court, such as Israel and the US.
In a statement, the court said that when “judicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk”. It said the court “will continue to fully discharge its mandate with independence and impartiality”.
In a statement on Tuesday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio branded the ICC “a corrupt and fatally politicised supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”.
The move came weeks after he announced the US was launching a “sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to US sovereignty”.
Rubio said he will pressure the court’s 125 member states to withdraw from the institution, sanction organisations that work with the court and ban staff from travelling to the US.
Venezuela and Chad have since announced they plan to leave the court, taking the number of countries to pull out in the past year to five. It takes a year for a country’s decision to quit the court to be formalised.
The sanctions can impact the daily lives of court officials. They prevent the ICC officials and their families from entering the US, and block their access to even basic financial services, making even going to a grocery store difficult.
Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, who was sanctioned last year, lost access to her credit cards, and Amazon’s Alexa stopped responding to her. “Your whole world is restricted,” she told the Associated Press.
Toshihiro Kitamura, press secretary at Japan’s Foreign Ministry, said: “The announced measures are very unfortunate.”
Tokyo has consistently supported the ICC in its efforts to prosecute and punish the most serious crimes of concern to the international community and to uphold the rule of law, he said.
“Japan will remain committed to strengthening the rule of law in the international community, while maintaining communication with related countries.”
Balkees Jarrah, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, called the sanctions “the latest example of the Trump administration’s utter contempt for international law and a naked attempt to shield American and Israeli officials implicated in serious crimes from justice”.
Human Rights Watch and three other groups sued the Trump administration last week to challenge its campaign against the ICC.
The complaint said Donald Trump’s executive order last year targeting the Hague-based criminal court and the sanctions issued against a UN human rights expert and three Palestinian rights groups were a “blatantly illegal attack on international justice and should be struck down”, according to a press release.
