 "US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk outside the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, US, January 27, 2020. File Image/Reuters")
Days after he met with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC). While imposing what the White House called “aggressive economic sanctions,” the international tribunal was accused of targeting the US and Israel.
The executive order grants Trump the broad power to impose freezing of assets along with travel bans against any ICC staff and their family members if the US determines that they were involved in the investigation and prosecution of US citizens and its allies. The order was seen as a retaliation to ICC’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. The Israeli leaders along with the now-deceased Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammad Dief, were accused of committing war crimes in Gaza.
In the order, Trump accused the ICC of “abusing power” by issuing warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. He claimed that the move “set a dangerous precedent” that endangered US citizens and its military personnel. “This malign conduct in turn threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States and undermines the critical national security and foreign policy work of the United States government and our allies, including Israel,” he added.
Trump warns of ‘significant consequences’
It is pertinent to note that neither the United States nor the state of Israel are members of the ICC and hence are not obligated to follow its orders. Trump insisted that the international court must “respect the decision” of countries “not to subject their personnel to the ICC’s jurisdiction”. In the order, he made it clear that the US “will impose tangible and significant consequences on those responsible for the ICC’s transgressions” including by blocking property and assets and suspending entry into the US of ICC officials and their family members.
While it was unclear if the Trump administration would release the names of specific individuals it plans to sanction, the ICC was preparing for the hurricane. Senior figures at the court, including its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, are readying themselves for the impact of the sanctions. On Thursday, ICC officials worked late into the night, awaiting the announcement from the White House, The Guardian reported.
Last week, a bill which called for the imposition of sweeping sanctions on ICC was stalled in the Senate after the Democrats refused to support the sanctions. Trump’s order received backlash from the secretary general of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, who said that the order “sends the message that Israel is above the law and the universal principles of international justice”.
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More Shorts“Today’s executive order is vindictive. It is aggressive. It is a brutal step that seeks to undermine and destroy what the international community has painstakingly constructed over decades if not centuries: global rules that are applicable to everyone and aim to deliver justice for all,” she furthered.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Trump issued sanctions against the ICC. During his first stint in office, Trump issued a separate but similar order in 2020. He imposed travel bans and asset freezes against the ICC’s former prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, who is Gambian, and one of the court’s top officials.
The order was imposed in response to the decision made by Bensouda in war crimes investigations in Afghanistan and the occupied Palestinian territories. In 2021, she upgraded the case to a formal criminal investigation. The current prosecutor, Karim Khan, eventually inherited the inquiry and later accelerated it after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel.