THE COURT
THE MANDATE
On July 1, 2002, after sixty countries ratified a treaty negotiated four years earlier in Rome, the International Criminal Court came into existence. It was built to do one thing no institution before it had done on a permanent basis: prosecute individual human beings, not states, for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression, regardless of where in the world they held power.
The court has no police force. It cannot try anyone in absentia. It cannot act unless a national justice system has proven unwilling or unable to prosecute the same crime itself. It depends entirely on the 125 countries that ratified the Rome Statute to make its warrants real, by arresting the people named in them and handing them over. Everything the ICC has ever accomplished, and everything it has failed to accomplish, runs through that single dependency.
The United States signed the Rome Statute in 2000, under Bill Clinton, then formally withdrew its signature two years later under George W. Bush. John Bolton delivered the letter himself. Congress followed with the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, legislation so aggressive against the court that European diplomats nicknamed it the Hague Invasion Act, for a provision authorizing the president to use military force to free any American held by the ICC. Israel unsigned the same year. Russia withdrew its own signature in 2016. China and India never signed at all. Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, only the UK and France are members of the court built to prosecute the world’s worst crimes.
That absence is the fact everything else in this story sits on top of.
THE RECORD
Twenty-four years in, the ICC’s record of convictions for the crimes it actually exists to prosecute is small enough to name in a single sentence: Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga, both Congolese militia commanders, convicted of war crimes; Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to destroying religious monuments in Timbuktu; Bosco Ntaganda, sentenced to thirty years, the longest term the court has handed down; Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier turned Lord’s Resistance Army commander, convicted on 61 counts; Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, convicted last year of torture and persecution in Mali. Jean-Pierre Bemba was convicted and then acquitted on appeal. Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Ivory Coast, was acquitted outright.
Justice Info’s independent count of the court’s own case files puts the number of clean convictions for genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes at three. Four more suspects never had charges confirmed for lack of evidence. Two saw charges withdrawn. Twelve people wanted by the court for these crimes remain free.
The most familiar names on that free list explain why. Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan when the ICC indicted him for genocide in Darfur in 2009, traveled openly to dozens of countries for years afterward, including fellow ICC member states obligated by treaty to arrest him. When he attended an African Union summit in South Africa in 2015, South African police let him leave the country even as their own domestic courts ordered his arrest. The ICC later ruled South Africa had broken the law. It took no further action. Jordan let him attend an Arab League summit in 2017 and got the same ruling. Vladimir Putin, wanted since 2023 for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, visited ICC member state Mongolia in 2024 and was not arrested; judges found Mongolia in violation and referred the matter to the court’s oversight assembly, which has no enforcement power of its own. Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted since November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, has visited Hungary, an ICC member, without incident; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán personally guaranteed his safety.
The pattern produced a specific, well-documented grievance from African governments, who make up the largest regional bloc of ICC member states and have hosted most of its investigations. The African Union called in 2016 for a mass withdrawal from the court, arguing that a prosecutor’s office repeatedly pursuing African suspects while the leaders of powerful non-member states walk free amounted to selective justice. Some of that caseload came from African governments referring cases against their own rebels and rivals. Some of it did not. Both things are true at once, and the court’s defenders and critics have spent a decade arguing about which one explains more of the record.
Then, on March 11, 2025, the pattern broke in a way nobody expected. Philippine police arrested former president Rodrigo Duterte at Manila’s airport and put him on a plane to The Hague within hours, under an ICC warrant charging him with crimes against humanity for the drug-war killings his government carried out between 2011 and 2019. The Philippines had withdrawn from the Rome Statute in 2019, specifically to avoid this outcome. The court kept jurisdiction over crimes committed while the country was still a member, and when his warrant finally came, Duterte’s own government executed it. He remains in ICC custody; a Hague chamber confirmed charges against him this past February. Only one other head of state, Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo, has ever been arrested and transferred to the court by his own country.
Twenty-four years, three clean convictions, twelve people still at large, and one sitting former president in a Dutch prison cell because his own police force decided to comply. That is the record the current campaign is aimed at.
THE CAMPAIGN
Washington’s hostility to the ICC did not begin this month, or this year. It has a paper trail stretching back to the court’s first year in existence, and it has escalated in the same direction every time an American ally has come within the court’s reach.
The first real test came in 2020, when then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda sought authorization to investigate alleged war crimes by American forces and CIA operatives in Afghanistan. The Trump administration’s response was unprecedented: an executive order freezing the assets of an international court official, followed by sanctions placing Bensouda and a colleague, Phakiso Mochochoko, on the same federal list used for terrorists and drug cartels. Both officials were nationals of small African states, Gambia and Lesotho. A more senior Canadian prosecutor who worked the same investigation was never named. Legal scholars who studied the episode called the pattern a “close allies’ filter,” in which officials from countries with less diplomatic leverage bore the consequences.
Joe Biden rescinded the sanctions in 2021. There matters stood until the ICC turned its attention to Israel.
In November 2024, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe they had used starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally targeted civilians in Gaza. A separate, independent body reached a harder conclusion. In September 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory formally found that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, citing mass killing, the deliberate infliction of conditions calculated to destroy the population, systematic sexual violence, and the direct targeting of children, and finding that public statements by senior Israeli officials constituted direct evidence of genocidal intent. The Commission reaffirmed and expanded that finding in June 2026, concluding the killing of Palestinian children had continued even after an October 2025 ceasefire. South Africa’s separate genocide case against Israel remains active before the International Court of Justice. Israel’s government has rejected every finding as fabricated.
Within weeks of returning to office in 2025, Trump signed a new executive order authorizing sanctions against anyone who assists an ICC investigation into a “protected person,” a category written to cover Americans and citizens of non-member allies like Israel. Prosecutor Karim Khan, who had sought the Netanyahu warrant, was sanctioned first, on February 10, 2025. Four more judges followed in June. Four more in August. Two more in December. By the time Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced what he called a “whole-of-government” campaign to dismantle the court this week, the sanctions list already ran a dozen names deep, and a UN special rapporteur and three Palestinian human rights organizations had been added to it for engaging with the court’s work.
The practical effect has been documented in granular, human detail by reporters who interviewed the people targeted. Khan’s UK bank accounts were frozen; Microsoft canceled his official email address, forcing him onto a Swiss provider. Judge Solomy Bossa of Uganda said she and a Peruvian colleague were sanctioned before judges from Canada, the UK, and Poland who sat on the identical bench and made the identical ruling. Judge Kimberly Prost, sanctioned for a 2020 vote authorizing the Afghanistan investigation, lost access to her credit cards and found her Amazon Alexa had stopped responding to her; an e-book she had already purchased disappeared from her device. Judge Beti Hohler said a friend’s gift, sent through Amazon, got the friend’s own account suspended. “Your whole world is restricted,” Prost told the Associated Press.
The damage has not stayed confined to individual inconvenience. The Associated Press reported in May 2025 that the sanctions had ground the court’s Sudan investigation to a halt entirely, even as new atrocities mounted in Darfur, because the American lawyer representing the ICC’s Sudan prosecutor was barred from providing him services under the sanctions regime. Palestinian human rights organizations that supply the court with evidence and witnesses from Gaza and the West Bank, including Al Mezan, reported frozen bank accounts, canceled services, and donors pulling out. Al Mezan’s director, Issam Younis, said the sanctions were designed “to silence us, stop us from doing our work, terrify us and terrify others.”
This week’s announcement is the same campaign, escalated and made explicit. Rubio’s Wall Street Journal op-ed used the phrase “brick by brick.” The State Department said no diplomatic option was “off limits.” The rights group DAWN said it would sue. Hungary offers the sharpest illustration of how fast the politics can turn. Orbán announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the court the same day he hosted Netanyahu in Budapest last April, calling the ICC “no longer an impartial court.” A year later, Hungarian voters removed Orbán from office entirely, ending his 16-year rule in a landslide. His successor, Péter Magyar, campaigned on returning Hungary to the EU mainstream; this week, the new government’s parliament voted to keep the country in the ICC. The UN and the EU both publicly defended the institution.
THE STAKES
Congress is, at the same moment, moving to make the US-Israel relationship permanent in a way it has never been before. A provision buried in the must-pass defense bill, Section 1217 in the Senate’s version, would direct the Pentagon to fuse Israeli defense technology into American weapons programs across missile defense, AI, cyber warfare, and autonomous systems, and would bar any future president from limiting intelligence-sharing with Israel over human rights concerns. Analysts at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft found the provision would entangle the two militaries more deeply than the roughly $200 billion in aid Israel has received from the US since 1948. Human Rights Watch has warned the arrangement would wall the cooperation off from the annual appropriations process, the yearly vote that currently gives Congress, and by extension voters, a chance to reconsider the relationship. Once the integration is built into weapons programs, contracts, and data-sharing infrastructure, unwinding it would mean unwinding functioning US military systems, not just declining to renew a line item.
That lock-in is happening while the documented conduct on the other end of it keeps accumulating a paper trail: war crimes and crimes against humanity per the ICC’s own warrant, and genocide per the UN’s own Commission of Inquiry, reaffirmed as recently as last month. Section 1217 does not reduce the exposure that creates. It extends it indefinitely, past this administration, past the next one, past whatever the war looks like five years from now. A permanent military entanglement with a government a UN body has formally found is committing genocide is a permanent liability by association, one no future Congress or president would be free to simply walk away from.
The ICC is one of the few institutions still generating that paper trail in a form governments and journalists cannot ignore: an arrest warrant, a named finding, a headline that follows a head of state’s travel schedule for the rest of his life. Dismantling it does not undo the entanglement Section 1217 is building. It reduces what the entanglement will visibly cost. Fewer active investigations, fewer sourced findings, fewer arrest warrants for the record to accumulate around, and the relationship Congress is locking in gets to exist with less of a paper trail attached to it, indefinitely.
The Sudan investigation is what that reduction looks like when it has already happened once. As this report goes to publication, the Rapid Support Forces have encircled El Obeid, a city of half a million people in North Kordofan, using the same tactics of siege and starvation that a UN fact-finding mission this month formally concluded amounted to genocide when the RSF took El Fasher in October, killing roughly 6,000 people in three days. The court that formally established that finding, the institution with the legal standing and the evidentiary mandate to eventually hold someone accountable for what happens in El Obeid, has had its Sudan investigation stalled for over a year because an American law firm could not risk representing the case without violating sanctions law. Nobody planned for the Sudan investigation specifically to go quiet. It went quiet anyway, as a side effect of a sanctions campaign built for an entirely different case. That is what happens to the paper trail once the institution generating it is defunded and starved of counsel. It does not stop selectively. It stops.
The court’s defenders and its critics have spent two decades arguing honestly about whether it applies its mandate evenly. The record supports parts of both arguments: African nations have borne a disproportionate share of its caseload, and some of that is self-inflicted through self-referral; the court’s most powerful potential defendants, in Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Washington, have evaded it with almost total impunity, protected less by law than by the diplomatic and economic weight their governments carry. Duterte’s arrest proved the system can still work when a government decides it will. The Bashir years proved just as clearly what happens when governments decide it won’t.
What the current American campaign proposes is not a correction to that imbalance. It is the imbalance’s total victory, engineered from the outside, by the one government whose absence from the Rome Statute has shaped the court’s limits since the day it opened, and now stands to benefit most from making sure the record stays that way.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
Sources: Rome Statute, Wikipedia (founding treaty, membership figures); International Criminal Court, Wikipedia (jurisdiction, mandate, complementarity); Council on Foreign Relations (US/China/Russia non-membership, founding history); ICC-CPI.int case records (conviction and sentencing details: Lubanga, Katanga, Al Mahdi, Ntaganda, Ongwen, Al Hassan); Justice Info (independent count of clean convictions and case outcomes); Al Jazeera (South Africa non-compliance ruling on Bashir); Amnesty International (Bashir travel pattern, Jordan non-compliance); EJIL:Talk! (Mongolia/Putin non-compliance finding); CNN (Netanyahu Hungary visit, Orbán guarantee); Wikipedia, ICC arrest warrants for Russian leaders (African Union bias criticism context); Wikipedia, Arrest of Rodrigo Duterte (Duterte arrest and transfer, February 2025); ICC-CPI.int, Duterte case (confirmation of charges, February 2026); Brookings (Gbagbo/Duterte as only two heads of state transferred by own governments); Center for Constitutional Rights (2020 Bensouda/Mochochoko sanctions, Executive Order 13928); JusticeInfo.net (”close allies’ filter” analysis); Wikipedia, Executive Order 14203 (2025 sanctions timeline: Khan, judges added June/August/December, Albanese); Courthouse News (personal impact on sanctioned judges, Al Mezan/Issam Younis quote); PBS/AP (Sudan investigation halted, Khan email/bank access); US News/AP (Prost, Hohler, Bossa personal accounts); Time (Rubio “brick by brick” campaign, July 2026); Euronews (EU “unacceptable” response, DAWN legal threat); SABC News (UN response); informat.ro (Hungary parliament vote); NPR (Orbán withdrawal announcement and “no longer an impartial court” quote, April 2025); CBS News (Orbán election defeat, Magyar victory, April 2026); Al Jazeera (UN genocide finding, El Fasher, July 2026); Wikipedia, United States-Israel FUTURES Act (Section 1217/219 provisions, Quincy Institute analysis on military integration scale); Human Rights Watch (Section 1217/219 oversight and appropriations concerns, data fusion); OHCHR (UN Commission of Inquiry genocide finding, September 2025); OHCHR (Commission of Inquiry follow-up finding on targeting of children, June 2026); CNN (South Africa ICJ case context, Israel’s rejection of findings)
