US sanctions on ICC and international justice mechanisms reveal fear of legal accountability

In The Autumn of the Patriarch (Gabriel García Márquez, 1975), the ageing dictator takes pleasure in just one thing: watching his fallen former colleagues playing cards in the room set aside for their exile, and revelling in their destitution and obsequiousness toward him. This portrayal of ageing power – obsessed with its own survival and with the spectacle of the downfall of once untouchable leaders – captures the fear of the moment when power ceases to protect those who once wielded it.

Contemporary attacks on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and international mechanisms for investigating human rights violations echo this sense of time, this fear of losing impunity, and bring to the fore the effective power of international law.

The US sanctions are less aimed at what these institutions can do that will challenge US sovereignty today than at what they might set in motion tomorrow. In addition to an arrest warrant, there may be a preliminary legal classification and proceedings, followed, why not, by a judgement and conviction.

But even more importantly, even if this is not fully achieved, international judges will play a central role in determining the legitimacy of condemning their actions as crimes and in determining how to characterise their epoch and regime, as the legacy of Nuremberg reminds us.

Therefore, the United States’ relentless campaign against international justice is not a sign of a calm and self-assured sovereignty. On the contrary, it betrays a deep-seated fear: that the legal language will outlive the political protections of the moment, and that those who believed they were protected by power may be caught up forever by the legal classification of their actions and their reputation.

In late July 2026, the US offensive against the international justice system crossed a threshold. This is no longer merely a matter of ad hoc sanctions against International Criminal Court officials or isolated figures within the United Nations.

In mid-July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a diplomatic campaign explicitly aimed at ‘dismantling’ the ICC, which is accused of encroaching on US sovereignty and threatening US officials, military personnel and political leaders.

This announcement extends Presidential Executive Order 14203, adopted by Donald Trump in February 2025, which declared a ‘national emergency’ in response to the court’s allegedly ‘illegitimate and unfounded’ actions targeting the United States and its close ally, Israel.

Gaza lies at the heart of the crackdown. US sanctions, which are explicitly intended to sanction individuals “directly involved in the illegitimate targeting of Israel”, have been extended to other individuals and institutions: ICC judges, United Nations Special Rapporteurs, Palestinian human rights organisations and civil society actors involved in documenting possible international crimes in Gaza and, more broadly, in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The ICC’s investigation into the situation in Palestine, the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the United Nations report and the work of Palestinian and international NGOs all provide opportunities for the legal characterisation of crimes that the US offensive seeks to delegitimise.

The issue is therefore not merely diplomatic or a specific form of lawfare. It concerns a more fundamental question: who can still legally name the violence perpetrated by the powerful and their allies, who can deliver justice to victims at international level?

The most striking feature of this sequence is the reversal of the accusation. Those investigating international crimes become the accused. Judges, prosecutors, rapporteurs and NGOs are no longer presented as actors seeking to establish accountability, but as threats to sovereignty, national security or political neutrality.

This shift is decisive. Instead of asking whether populations have been bombed, starved, displaced, persecuted or deprived of the basic conditions for survival, the debate is redirected toward those who raise these questions: has the prosecutor overstepped his mandate? Is the rapporteur an activist? Is the court biased? Are the organisations documenting the crimes politically motivated?

This strategy of reversal creates what might be called a ‘punishment of the right to judge’. US sanctions transform the act of investigating, legally characterising crimes and holding people to account for behaviour that is deemed suspicious, hostile and punishable.

This reversal is not merely a matter of rhetoric. It is embodied in concrete measures: asset freezes, visa restrictions, transaction bans, and pressure on institutions that cooperate with or enter into dealings with the targeted individuals or entities.

The person who names the crime becomes the focal point around which risk and risk management are organised.

It would be tempting to see these sanctions as proof of the impotence of international law. In fact, the opposite is true. If the ICC, the Special Rapporteurs or documentation NGOs were insignificant, there would be no need to sanction them.

In this sense, the sanction is an unwitting admission. It acknowledges that reports, arrest warrants, legal characterisations, advisory opinions and international investigations retain the capacity to undermine impunity. Their strength does not always lie in immediate coercion.

The ICC does not have a global police force; Special Rapporteurs do not issue enforceable judgements. But their words circulate and find their way into archives, the media, social movements, national legal proceedings, diplomatic debates and collective memories.

What is feared, therefore, is not merely judicial condemnation, but the sedimentation of a legal classification: the fact that an act of violence is permanently recorded as a crime, rather than as a mere military operation, a security necessity or regrettable collateral damage.

This does not mean that international justice should be idealised. It has always been shaped by selectivity, power relations and imperial legacies. But the current sanctions clearly do not challenge international law on the grounds of these biases; on the contrary, they exploit them to prevent certain powerful figures, or their allies, from being named and judged by institutions over which they have no control.

The acknowledgement of the power of the law also lies in the fact that the United States does not merely respond with extra-legal threats to undermine international justice. It produces its own administrative law against those who use international criminal law and human rights laws: presidential decrees, sanctions lists, administrative procedures, compliance obligations. Instruments designed to combat terrorism, proliferation, money laundering or illicit financing are redirected toward judges, investigators, rapporteurs or human rights organisations.

The attack on international justice thus presents itself in the guise of legality. Except that the logic is obviously not that of an adversarial trial, with evidence, public debate and detailed reasoning. It is that of listing: a person or entity is designated as a risk, a threat or a prohibited actor; this designation then triggers a chain reaction.

The difference is fundamental. A judgement presupposes a procedure, adversarial proceedings, a statement of reason, and a case file that can be challenged. An administrative sanction does not constitute a legal conviction in the traditional sense. Being placed on a list works differently: it identifies a risk and leaves it to the administrative, financial and digital infrastructures to draw their own conclusions.

This approach is all the more effective because it relies on the diligence of intermediaries. Banks, digital platforms, airlines, hotels, universities, NGOs, insurers and service providers do not always need to be directly compelled to act. It is sufficient for them to anticipate the risk.

This is why these sanctions should not be seen merely as symbolic measures targeting high-profile individuals. Their impact is felt through the ordinary infrastructure of everyday life and work.

Cases that have already been documented include cancelled bank cards, closed online accounts, suspended Google or Amazon services, difficulties in booking a hotel, disrupted banking relationships, and financing that has been slowed down or blocked. The sanction does not merely alter what the targeted individual can do; it alters what others are prepared to do with them. Should we maintain this invitation? Reimburse this travel? Host this conference? Cooperate with this NGO? Fund this programme? The risk is contagious.

Taken in isolation, each incident may seem minor. Taken together, they form a kind of infrastructural punishment. Yet international justice also depends on very mundane matters: flights, visas, hotels, databases, digital subscriptions, secure communication tools, institutional reimbursements, banking services, translations, archives, and academic and civil society collaborations. Disrupting these channels is tantamount to attempting to interfere with the very possibility of investigating, writing a report, preparing an arrest warrant or supporting victims.

Such an attempt may well succeed, since in an environment of sanctions, institutions often prefer to exclude too broadly rather than risk being accused of not excluding enough. A false positive costs less than a false negative: in other words, caution seems less costly to them than facing a challenge.

The US offensive against the ICC and against those involved in international justice is therefore not directed solely at a particular institution. It targets the very possibility of a third-party authority: a body capable of describing violence in terms other than those used by the states that perpetrate or support it.

The rhetoric of sovereignty plays a central role here. It portrays the ICC as a foreign intrusion, even though the Court is founded on the Rome Statute, adopted by sovereign states, and exercises its jurisdiction only under limited conditions. As the UN reiterated in July 2026, the ICC remains an ‘essential cog’ in the fight against impunity for the most serious crimes.

What is at stake is not so much a simple conflict between sovereignty and international law as a struggle over who has the authority to characterise violence. The most powerful states readily accept international law when it targets their adversaries. They reject it when it purports to apply to themselves or their allies.

International law that had become entirely harmless would not provoke such fierce opposition. What these sanctions reveal is not the death of international law, but the intensity of the struggle over what it can still achieve: defining a crime, establishing liability, and keeping open the possibility that state violence might be judged by someone other than those who justify it.

The European International Studies Association in Lisbon will devote a panel to this topic from September 1st-4th.

The journal Cultures & Conflits will, in 2027, devote an entire issue to the issues raised by the sanctions. It will follow on from the 2025-2 issue on the symbolic power of the law, available on Cairn. Proposals for articles and personal accounts relating to international sanctions should be sent now to Cultures & Conflits at [email protected].