Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Washington was stepping up efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC), including by expanding the use of sanctions and pressing the court’s member countries to withdraw. This policy represents a significant escalation in the ongoing conflict between Washington and the international legal body regarding investigations into alleged war crimes in Palestine.
The White House action falls into a broader, consistent pattern: ever since the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine, individuals and institutions involved in documenting war crimes and prosecuting the accused have been systematically targeted by the United States government. This campaign of pressure is designed to shield Israel from international legal scrutiny.
To date, the US administration has utilized Executive Order 1420 to sanction ICC prosecutors, eight ICC judges, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and three leading Palestinian human rights groups. Those targeted have faced severe personal and professional consequences, including frozen bank accounts, rejected financial transactions, terminated digital services, and restricted travel.
That pressure campaign now faces its most direct legal challenge yet. On Tuesday, four major US human rights groups—Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Open Society Institute—filed a lawsuit against the US administration over the sanctions regime.
The plaintiffs argue that the sanctions are unconstitutional and exceed presidential authority. They contend that the order is built on a manufactured “national emergency” that fails to survive scrutiny under US sanctions law. Furthermore, they argue that the reasoning used by courts to find previous sanctions against lawyers and rights defenders unconstitutional under the First Amendment should apply here, as their work constitutes protected speech.
“Our lawsuit is seeking to put an end to the sanctions regime as a whole,” according to Elizabeth Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch. She emphasizes that the goal is to ensure the ICC and its collaborators can operate without fear of reprisal. “We are asking the court to stop the US administration from enforcing the sanctions already in place and to prevent it from issuing any additional sanctions,” Evenson tells.
Washington has long argued that the ICC’s investigation of American citizens violates US sovereignty, claiming it does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction over its nationals. However, critics point out that US citizens accused of crimes committed abroad can already face prosecution in the countries where those crimes occurred, in line with the principle of territorial jurisdiction.
The human impact of these sanctions has been profound. In 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was sanctioned by Washington just days after publishing a report detailing how dozens of corporations, including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Palantir, were enabling and profiting from Israel’s occupation. Albanese lost her US bank account and, briefly, her only apartment after Washington accused her of “biased and malicious activities” for doing exactly what her mandate requires: documenting violations in the occupied Palestinian territories and reporting them to the UN system.
Similarly, in May 2026, a federal judge in Washington blocked Albanese’s sanctions outright, finding that her ICC recommendations were nothing more than protected speech with “no binding effect” on the court. This ruling provides a potential legal precedent for the current lawsuit.
The case of Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan highlights the intensity of the pressure. Khan, who opened the Gaza investigation and sought an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, was forced to step aside in May 2025 amid a misconduct allegation. Although Khan was cleared of any wrongdoing by an ICC judicial panel in March 2026, a bureau of member states voted to disregard that finding and removed him anyway.
Khan later revealed in July that US senators threatened him directly regarding the investigation. “Twelve senators wrote, and they said, ‘If you target Israel, we will target you and your family. You have been warned.’ That’s almost a verbatim quotation,” Khan stated. This intimidation tactic underscores the lengths to which US officials have gone to derail the court’s proceedings.
Evenson maintains that governments must not allow sanctions to become a tool for shielding alleged war criminals from accountability. “We are asking the court to protect justice,” she says, urging the international community to stand together. “They can stand together and make clear that they support the ICC’s work, and that they will work together to protect the court’s independence,” she tells.
In September 2025, three of Palestine’s most prominent human rights groups; Al-Haq, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and Al-Mezan, were also sanctioned for supplying the ICC with the testimonies, forensic data, a
But Washington’s intimidation failed to silence anyone documenting or prosecuting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, where the Palestinian death toll has passed 75,000 since October 2023.
“It is an affront to all victims and survivors of war crimes and genocide.”
In September 2025, three of Palestine’s most prominent human rights groups; Al-Haq, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and Al-Mezan, were also sanctioned for supplying the ICC with the testimonies, forensic data, and casualty records their teams have compiled for decades, material that helped underpin the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
The US “seeks to intimidate human rights defenders and deter people of conscience from advocating for the rights and dignity of others,” Ajlouny adds.
“They betray historic US leadership in the cause of international justice and are a slap in the face to victims and survivors of grave crimes everywhere who depend on the ICC as a court of last resort,” Goldston adds.
In 2020, the US administration sanctioned senior ICC officials, including then Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, after the court announced it would investigate war crimes by US forces in Afghanistan and Israeli forces in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Bensouda had reportedly received direct threats from Israeli intelligence officials warning her against pursuing cases that could put her or her family at risk.
The US then froze her assets and barred her from entering the country.
“The fact that so many leading human rights and humanitarian organisations have come together to challenge Trump’s unlawful executive order demonstrates the widespread harm it is causing across civil society groups dedicated to bringing those responsible for grave crimes to justice,” says lead counsel Andrew Loewenstein of Foley Hoag LLP.
In the meantime, there is a clear role here for all ICC member countries around the globe.”