By Alexis Anagnostakis | Criminal Defence Barrister | Human Rights Officer, ECBA | Member, ICC List of Counsel
On 6 February 2025, the President of the United States signed Executive Order 14203, imposing sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court. Since then, eleven ICC judges and prosecutors have been designated on the US Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list — their assets blocked, their travel barred, their professional existence made contingent on decisions taken in Washington rather than The Hague.
This is not a dispute about jurisdiction. It is a campaign to make judicial independence conditional.
The Architecture of the Campaign
The sanctions programme unfolded in deliberate waves. The first designation targeted ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan KC in February 2025. Four judges followed in June — including those who had issued the arrest warrant for Prime Minister Netanyahu and those who had authorised an investigation into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. August brought further designations against two deputy prosecutors and two additional judges. December 2025 extended the list to members of the Appeals Division.
By January 2026, eleven ICC officials had been designated. Secretary of State Rubio had, by August 2025, publicly described the ICC as “a bankrupt institution” and “a national-security threat.”
The stated legal basis — that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over nationals of non-signatory states — is a longstanding US position. The novelty lies in translating that political objection into personal financial coercion directed at sitting judges. The question is not whether one agrees with the ICC’s jurisdictional reach. The question is whether sanctioning individual judicial officers for applying the law as they understand it is a permissible instrument of foreign policy in a system governed by the rule of law.
The answer, on any defensible reading of international standards on judicial independence, is no.
The Condition That Was Never Announced
In December 2025, Middle East Eye reported that the Trump administration had privately conditioned the lifting of sanctions on the ICC discontinuing its Palestine and Afghanistan investigations. Washington had also urged states parties to amend the Rome Statute to prohibit prosecutions of nationals from non-signatory states — an amendment that would, in practice, confer permanent immunity on American and Israeli nationals.
This reported condition deserves careful attention. It means that personal sanctions imposed on judges — measures that freeze assets and bar travel — were being used as leverage to secure specific judicial outcomes. That is not foreign policy pressure on a treaty body. It is improper interference with judicial decision-making. It has a precise name in the vocabulary of international human rights law: a violation of the guarantee of judicial independence.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers made this explicit in January 2026, calling for immediate withdrawal of all designations and repeal of the Executive Order, describing the sanctions as striking “at the very heart of the promise born of the Rome Statute and the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials.”
The Practical Consequences for the Court
The institutional effects are already measurable. ICC officials subject to designation cannot travel to the United States. Security Council briefings — a critical mechanism for ICC accountability — have progressively shifted from in-person to video. The chilling effect extends beyond the sanctioned individuals themselves.
Legal scholars have noted that Germany, a founding Rome Statute state, declined to put forward a candidate for the next round of judicial elections. The official explanation cited competing priorities. Whether the sanctions environment shaped that decision — and whether it is shaping similar calculations in other states parties — is a question that cannot yet be answered, but cannot responsibly be ignored.
The concern is structural: if judicial candidacy at the ICC becomes a professional liability, the long-term composition and calibre of the Court is affected. This is how institutional damage operates — not through a single dramatic act, but through accumulated deterrence.
The European Response and the Blocking Statute
Spain’s Prime Minister wrote to European Commission President von der Leyen in May 2026, calling for activation of the EU’s Blocking Statute. The Statute — originally designed to shield European entities from US secondary sanctions in the Iran and Cuba contexts — would, if activated, prohibit EU-based persons and institutions from complying with the ICC-related designations and provide a mechanism for recovering damages arising from compliance.
The legal architecture is available. Activation would represent a clear signal that European states parties regard the ICC sanctions as incompatible with their treaty obligations and with EU law. Whether the political will exists to deploy it remains the central question. The EU has moved cautiously, conscious of the broader transatlantic context. But the legal instrument exists, and the argument for using it grows stronger with each new designation.
Pressure, Release, and the Continued Designation
On 20 May 2026, OFAC removed UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese from the SDN list. Seven days later, a new ICC-related designation was issued.
This sequencing is instructive. The Albanese delisting was presented as a standalone administrative action. The simultaneous new designation makes clear that the programme is active and expanding. The pressure-and-release pattern — removing one name while adding another — is a recognised feature of coercive diplomacy. It signals willingness to negotiate while maintaining the underlying coercive instrument. The Court remains subject to active designation pressure.
A Note on Institutional Criticism and Institutional Integrity
It would be incomplete to discuss this topic without acknowledging that the ICC is not beyond legitimate criticism. Questions about the Court’s relationship with African states, its prosecutorial prioritisation, its resource constraints, and the conduct of specific proceedings are all subjects of serious ongoing debate within the international legal community. The position taken here does not depend on the ICC being above reproach.
It depends on a different proposition: that a court — any court — must be free to apply the law without its judges facing personal financial retaliation for doing so. The moment that principle is abandoned, the distinction between a court and an instrument of political power collapses entirely.
Defence counsel understand this intuitively. We spend our professional lives arguing that the law must apply equally — to the powerful and the powerless, to states and individuals, to allies and adversaries. That argument has no force in a system where judicial officers can be sanctioned into changing their decisions. If we are prepared to accept personal sanctions on judges as a legitimate tool of statecraft, we are not merely undermining the ICC. We are conceding that judicial independence is conditional — available where convenient, suspended where inconvenient.
That concession, once made, is not easily retrieved.
Conclusion
The sanctions campaign against ICC officials represents an unprecedented use of economic coercion to influence the conduct of an international judicial institution. It raises fundamental questions about the relationship between state power and judicial independence at the international level — questions that are directly relevant to practitioners who work within, or alongside, that system.
The European response has been consistent in principle and cautious in practice. The Blocking Statute remains unused. New designations continue. And the Court continues to function — under conditions of deliberate uncertainty designed, it appears, to test how much pressure its officials and its institutions can sustain before the behaviour changes.
That is the experiment currently underway. The outcome matters well beyond The Hague.
Alexis Anagnostakis is a criminal defence barrister registered with the Athens Bar Association (No. 25132). He serves as Human Rights Officer and Chair of the Human Rights Committee at the European Criminal Bar Association (ECBA), as a member of the Greek Delegation and Criminal Law Committee at the CCBE, and is admitted to the ICC List of Counsel. He is a member of the EU Expert Group on Anti-SLAPP and has appeared as third-party intervener before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights.
