This week, the Trump administration unleashed a new fusillade against the International Criminal Court, proving the lengths to which the president is willing to go against international organizations that threaten U.S. interests.
On Wednesday, the U.S. imposed full blocking sanctions against Francesca Albanese, a rabidly anti-Israel academic and U.N. special rapporteur, who has previously complained about the “Jewish lobby’s” purported subjugation of America and made other antisemitic remarks.
While Albanese is an unpaid “expert” who reports to the U.N.’s human rights mechanisms, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed to her role in furthering ICC efforts against Israel and said that, therefore, she can be designated under President Trump’s executive order targeting the court. A proximate rationale for the sanctions, Rubio said, was Albanese’s campaign of “lawfare” against numerous American companies, “making extreme and unfounded accusations.” She recommended that the ICC bring cases against those firms, Rubio said.
Her addition to the U.S. Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list means that Albanese will be barred from entering the U.S. and transacting with Americans, and any assets she owns in America will be frozen. This could complicate some of Albanese’s relationships with U.S. institutions of higher learning; she lists an affiliation with Georgetown University on her U.N. web page and has previously disclosed support from Columbia and Harvard.
The previous day, the State Department legal adviser, Reed Rubinstein, delivered an unequivocal threat against the court at a U.N. conference, pledging that Washington will “use all appropriate and effective diplomatic, political, and legal instruments to block ICC overreach.”
“We expect all ICC actions against the United States and our ally Israel, that is, all investigations and all arrest warrants, to be terminated. If not, all options remain on the table,” he said in a speech to the court’s organizing assembly. He was responding to a push by the court to expand its jurisdiction beyond state parties to the ICC’s governing Rome Statute, to which the U.S. is famously not party.
The upshot is that Trump is willing to widen his use of tools that no president before him had ever used before against anti-American officials and international organizations.
This week’s developments followed a series of noteworthy events that have unfurled over the past several months. Trump’s February 6 executive order authorizing the use of full-blocking sanctions against ICC officials involved in prosecutions targeting the U.S. and Israel (which is also not party to the court’s Rome Statute) reprises a nearly identical order he issued during his first term, when his administration imposed sanctions on the then-prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda.
The sanctions that he imposed against her successor, Karim Khan, in February over his prosecution of Israeli leaders was consistent with the first-term actions. Now, his administration has expanded that campaign. Then, on June 5, the U.S. designated four ICC judges over their role in authorizing an investigation of Americans’ conduct in Afghanistan and Khan’s prosecution.
Up to this point, the Trump administration’s message to the court has been clear: The U.S. does not submit to its jurisdiction, and attempts to target Washington and its allies will be met with unprecedented measures against personnel associated with the ICC and the U.N. Rubinstein’s remarks to the assembly do not constitute an idle threat. It would be unsurprising to see more sanctions follow. Rather than continue to threaten American opponents of the ICC, individuals affiliated with international organizations would do well to consider that the White House can cripple the court and make pariahs out of anti-U.S. figures at these bodies, if it chooses to do so.