US President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Thursday to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) for targeting the United States and its allies, such as Israel, US media and Reuters reported.
The order will place financial and visa sanctions on unnamed individuals and their family members who assist in ICC investigations of US citizens or US allies, said a White House official, cited by Reuters.
The reports come shortly after a visit to the White House by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the ICC over alleged war crimes and crimes against hummanity committed in Gaza since October 2023.
The first Trump administration imposed sanctions on ICC officials in 2020 when the court investigated alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. This time, the sanctions are linked to the court’s investigation into Israel, according to NBC News.
NBC News said it obtained a fact sheet on the executive order, which is expected to be issued later on Thursday.
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“The ICC was designed to be a court of last resort,” it cited the fact sheet as saying. “Both the United States and Israel maintain robust judiciary systems and should never be subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC.”
Trump’s 2020 sanctions were reversed under the presidency of Joe Biden, who conditionally backed ICC investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
On his first day back in the Oval Office last month, Trump reversed Biden’s ending of the 2020 sanctions.
The US is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, and has had a rocky relationship with the court since its establishment in 2002.
The ICC, based in The Hague, is the world’s first permanent international criminal court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
Netanyahu is the first western-backed state leader to be the subject of an arrest warrant by the court.
The court’s president Tomoko Akane warned in December against the possible sanctions, saying they represent an existential threat to the world’s permanent criminal justice institution: “The Court is being threatened with draconian economic sanctions (…) as if it was a terrorist organisation,” she said. “These measures would rapidly undermine the Court’s operations in all situations and cases and jeopardise its very existence”.
Senate Democrats in January blocked a House bill that could have led to a legislation to sanction the ICC. But Trump has the authority to issue an executive order without the need for a legislation.
“Absent some kind of strong plan, the sanctions could severely disrupt the Court’s work,” Todd Buchwald, the former United States ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, told MEE in January.
