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Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Tuesday new sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) President Tomoko Akane and senior ICC trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye. Rubio said the sanctions were part of the Trump administration’s “unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a court.”
In a mid-July Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rubio stated the Trump administration was “dismantling” the ICC because the court claimed the authority to prosecute American officials before non-American judges for violations of international laws to which the U.S. had not consented.
“The ICC and its allies now seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the US and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens,” Rubio wrote. He cited ICC investigations into alleged conduct by U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan as a concrete example of the court claiming jurisdiction over American military personnel from a nation that never ratified the Rome Statute.
The new sanctions are the administration’s next step in a campaign against ICC overreach initiated by a Trump executive order in February 2025. The Trump administration’s position is straightforward: the U.S. has never ratified the ICC’s founding treaty and the court therefore has no legitimate authority over American citizens or military personnel — full stop.
Even former President Bill Clinton — who declined to send the ICC’s founding treaty to the Senate in December 2000 — had warned about its problematic jurisdictional claims. Clinton cited “significant flaws,” including the court’s stated intent to exercise authority over personnel of states that had never ratified the treaty.
The ICC criticized the US decision, with the court’s backers describing the sanctions as an attempt to shield officials from accountability. Rubio dismissed those objections, calling the ICC a “sham” and reaffirming that the US will not allow an unaccountable international body to exercise jurisdiction over American citizens. The sanctions freeze any US-jurisdiction assets held by Akane and Seye and bar them from contact with the American financial system.
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