The U.S. Department of the Treasury made public this Tuesday that it will impose sanctions on the president of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Tomoko Akane, as well as on a lawyer from the court, due to their involvement in the investigation regarding Israel for the war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has added the Japanese magistrate and the Senegalese Abdoulaye Seye, a senior litigation attorney of the ICC, to its list of sanctioned individuals, without providing additional information about the specific reasons for now.
At the same time, OFAC has issued a specific license that allows for the settlement of operations and transactions involving both members of the court until September 17, after which they will be fully subject to the restrictions.
These measures add to those already adopted previously by the Trump Administration against eight other judges of the ICC, as well as against its former chief prosecutor Karim Khan and two other deputy prosecutors, thus expanding the scope of pressure on the court based in The Hague.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended the decision by accusing the last two sanctioned individuals of having "directly participated in the ICC's initiatives to investigate, detain, imprison, or prosecute officials" from countries that have not signed the Rome Statute, something that, he warned in a statement, "sets a dangerous precedent for all nations."
The top U.S. diplomat has placed these sanctions within a "diplomatic campaign" aimed at curbing what he considers "abuses of power" by the ICC, and has expressed his intention for other governments to support this course of action.
"The Trump Administration has been clear: the ICC is a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and overstepped its mandate. We will not tolerate its attack on state sovereignty," Rubio emphasized.
In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, attributing to them alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the context of the military offensive that began more than a year earlier on the Gaza Strip.