Over the course of this past year, the US government has imposed two rounds of sanctions against judges and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court. The sanctions came in the wake of, and were largely in response to, the court’s issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. (A similar warrant was also issued at the time for Hamas commander Mohmmed Deif, for his role in planning the October 7th attacks, but Deif was subsequently killed in an air strike.) The United States is one of a small number of countries – including China, Russia and Israel – that were not signatories of the 1998 treaty establishing the court, and it has never recognised the legitimacy of the institution.
Since the sanctions, the judges and prosecutors named in the order have been working under extraordinarily difficult conditions. The French jurist Nicolas Guillou, a member of the pretrial panel that approved and issued the warrant against Netanyahu and Gallant, gave an interview with Le Monde last week in which he discussed the extent of the measures against him, and the effects those measures were having on his ability to live and work.
His presence on the sanctions list – which include, along with his fellow ICC officials, members of Isis, al-Qaeda, and various organised-crime groups – means that Guillou is not able to enter the United States. (During the years of the Obama administration, he worked in Washington, assisting the US justice department on matters of judicial co-operation.) Although presumably that is well down the list of the problems he is faced with: the measures have made it impossible to live an ordinary life even in Europe.
The sanctions prohibit any American citizen or legal entity, including their overseas subsidiaries, from providing him with services of any kind. In practice, this has made it almost impossible for Guillou to conduct his affairs in any kind of normal manner. His accounts with American companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal have all been closed.
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“For example,” Guillou told Le Monde, “I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent me an email cancelling the reservation, citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you do not know if the packaging your product come in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.”
Any bank transaction that involves an American company or individual – or that is conducted using US dollars or currencies using the dollar for conversion – is now impossible for Guillou. The near-total dominance of American companies (Mastercard, Visa, American Express) over payment card services means that he is no longer able to use a credit or debit card.
The intention of these sanctions, and the extraordinary difficulties they cause for the ICC judges, is obvious. They are aimed at sabotaging the work of the court and, in a larger sense, delegitimising the institutions of international law. In his statement on the sanctions this summer, US secretary of state Marco Rubio called the court “a national security threat that has been an instrument for lawfare against the United States and our close ally Israel”.
One of the most unsettling dimensions of the destruction of Gaza – of the crimes against humanity for which the ICC issued its arrest warrants in 2024 – was the growing sense that what would emerge from that destruction was a new global order, whereby even the formal adherence to ideas of international law and human rights would be jettisoned. As horrible in itself as the relentless orgy of violence against Palestinians is, it is also a kind of laboratory for a more nakedly inhuman global politics. The sanctions against ICC judges feel like an advance tremor of a future barbarism.
These sanctions are, in the end, less remarkable in themselves than the complete failure of European institutions to protect Guillou – a French judge at an international court based in the Netherlands – from their effects. (The French government has done nothing to defend Guillou, or the court itself, which it helped to found. In fact, it has reneged on its own obligation, as a signatory of the court, to honour the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, saying that they would not face arrest should they travel to France.)
[ US sanctions on ICC judges should trouble us allOpens in new window ]
The resulting irony is that the US president’s executive orders amount to a kind of de facto international law, forcing ICC officials – and international law itself – into quasi-outlawhood. The rule of law itself is driven underground and delegitimised, preparing the ground for a world without recourse to any authority higher than that of brute power.
“Some believe that power should serve the law,” as Guillou remarked in that Le Monde interview. “That is the very principle of international law. Others, on the contrary, believe that the law should serve power. For them, international criminal justice is an obstacle. It is an obstacle to empires. That is why we are under attack.”
International criminal justice, as he eloquently put it, “is not an abstraction. Our cases concern hundreds, even thousands, of victims of murder, rape and torture. They speak of their suffering, of thousands of corpses, the maimed and orphans. When the court is attacked, it is the victims who are silenced.”
The relative lack of outcry and seemingly total lack of action over this situation is profoundly depressing. Perhaps it stems from a misunderstanding that, because an institution like the International Criminal Court is invested with a high legal authority, it is also somehow possessed of extraordinary power to go with it.
[ International Criminal Court comes out fighting in wake of US sanctionsOpens in new window ]
Yet the court commands no legions. It has the power to investigate and to prosecute crimes like those of which Netanyahu and Gallant stand credibly accused; it does not have the power to enforce those rulings. For that it is dependent on the governments of its signatory countries. Likewise, the court and its officials have no means to defend themselves against attempts to hollow out their legal authority. They require active and vigorous defence by those who profess to believe in them.
