Zeynep ConkarLast month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Washington was stepping up efforts to “dismantle” the ICC, including by expanding the use of sanctions and pressing the court’s member countries to withdraw.
The White House action falls into a pattern: ever since the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine, people involved in documenting the war crimes and prosecuting the accused have been targetted by the US.
To date, the US administration has used Executive Order 1420 to sanction ICC prosecutors, eight ICC judges, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and three leading Palestinian human rights groups in an effort to shield Israel from scrutiny.
Those targeted have had bank accounts frozen or closed, financial transactions rejected, digital services cut off, and travel restricted.
That pressure campaign now faces its most direct legal challenge yet. On Tuesday, four major US human rights groups sued the US administration over the sanctions on the ICC.
The plaintiffs, Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the American Friends Service Committee and the Open Society Institute, argue that the current sanctions violate their First and Fifth Amendment rights and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“Our lawsuit is seeking to put an end to the sanctions regime as a whole,” according to Elizabeth Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch.
“We are asking the court to stop the US administration from enforcing the sanctions already in place and to prevent it from issuing any additional sanctions,” Evenson tells TRT World.
“We aim to make sure that the ICC and all those working with it can do so without fear of reprisal,” she adds.
Intimidation as a tool of US policy
Washington has long argued that the ICC's investigation of American citizens violates US sovereignty because it does not recognise the court's jurisdiction over its nationals.
But US citizens accused of crimes committed abroad can already face prosecution in the countries where those crimes occurred, in line with a principle of international law.
In 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was sanctioned by Washington just days after publishing a report detailing how dozens of corporations, including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Palantir, were enabling and profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its genocide in Gaza.
Albanese lost her US bank account and, briefly, her only apartment after Washington accused her of "biased and malicious activities" for doing exactly what her mandate requires: documenting violations in the occupied Palestinian territories and reporting them to the UN system.
Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, on the other hand, who opened the Gaza investigation and sought Netanyahu's arrest warrant, was forced to step aside in May 2025 amid a misconduct allegation.
Khan was cleared of any wrongdoing by an ICC judicial panel in March 2026, but a bureau of member states voted to disregard that finding and removed him anyway.
Khan later in July revealed that US senators threatened him directly.
“Twelve senators wrote, and they said, ‘If you target Israel, we will target you and your family. You have been warned.’ That’s almost a verbatim quotation,” Khan said.
In September 2025, three of Palestine's most prominent human rights groups; Al-Haq, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and Al-Mezan, were also sanctioned for supplying the ICC with the testimonies, forensic data, and casualty records their teams have compiled for decades, material that helped underpin the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
But Washington's intimidation failed to silence anyone documenting or prosecuting Israel's war crimes in Gaza, where the Palestinian death toll has passed 75,000 since October 2023.
The US administration’s campaign to dismantle the ICC and punish those seeking accountability for grave human rights violations would have consequences far beyond the individuals and organisations directly targeted, according to Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee.
“It is an affront to all victims and survivors of war crimes and genocide.”
The US “seeks to intimidate human rights defenders and deter people of conscience from advocating for the rights and dignity of others,” Ajlouny adds.
Built on what's already succeeded
The groups are not challenging the sanctions on untested legal ground.
These sanctions are an assault on the rule of law, independent judges and prosecutors, and civil society in the US and around the world, according to James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.
“They betray historic US leadership in the cause of international justice and are a slap in the face to victims and survivors of grave crimes everywhere who depend on the ICC as a court of last resort,” Goldston adds.
In 2020, the US administration sanctioned senior ICC officials, including then Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, after the court announced it would investigate war crimes by US forces in Afghanistan and Israeli forces in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Bensouda had reportedly received direct threats from Israeli intelligence officials warning her against pursuing cases that could put her or her family at risk. The US then froze her assets and barred her from entering the country. A federal judge later struck down the sanctions, ruling that they violated the First Amendment.
Similarly, in May 2026, a federal judge in Washington blocked Albanese's sanctions outright, finding that her ICC recommendations were nothing more than protected speech with "no binding effect" on the court.
The rights groups argue that the same reasoning that led courts to find sanctions against lawyers and rights defenders unconstitutional under the First Amendment should apply again.
“The fact that so many leading human rights and humanitarian organisations have come together to challenge Trump’s unlawful executive order demonstrates the widespread harm it is causing across civil society groups dedicated to bringing those responsible for grave crimes to justice,” says lead counsel Andrew Loewenstein of Foley Hoag LLP.
“... They are seeking an end to this sanctions regime, which transgresses the president’s authority and violates international and US law, including the rights to freedom of expression and religion,” Loewenstein adds.
Their complaint also argues the order exceeds presidential authority altogether, built on what they call a manufactured "national emergency" that doesn't survive scrutiny under US sanctions law itself.
If they win, it would be the first ruling to challenge the sanctions structure as a whole, rather than carving out exceptions one name at a time.
Governments should not allow sanctions to become a tool for shielding alleged war criminals from accountability, according to Evenson.
“We are asking the court to protect justice. In the meantime, there is a clear role here for all ICC member countries around the globe.”
“They can stand together and make clear that they support the ICC’s work, and that they will work together to protect the court’s independence,” she tells TRT World.
