On August 18, the Trump administration designated Tomoko Akane, the president of the International Criminal Court, and Abdoulaye Seye, a senior ICC trial lawyer, for sanctions under Executive Order 14203. The measures freeze any assets the two officials hold in the United States and cut them off from the U.S. financial system. With these designations, the United States has now sanctioned nine of the ICC’s 18 judges, both deputy prosecutors, and the Court’s former chief prosecutor. The same order has been used to designate United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and three Palestinian human rights organizations, Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. In addition to harming the designated persons and entities, the designations curtail the rights of U.S. citizens. The executive order makes it a crime for U.S. citizens to receive or provide “any services” to or from designated persons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not describe these recent designations as a response to a specific investigation. He said the administration stands ready to “systematically dismantle the ICC until it is incapable of threatening American sovereignty.” The move builds on the diplomatic campaign he launched in July to press other governments to abandon the Court, a call at least five countries have reportedly heeded.
Judge Akane is the first sitting ICC president to be sanctioned. Seye is reportedly a senior trial lawyer on the prosecution team that sought an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Akane has also been nominated for election as an ICC judge. Media coverage of the designations has, understandably, focused on what they mean for the Court and for the future of international accountability. Largely missing is how the designations threaten constitutional rights and democracy in the United States. These impacts are not lost on American scholars, lawyers, and justice advocates. They and their lawyers have repeatedly challenged the government’s use of sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to punish U.S. citizens for working with the ICC to ensure accountability for the gravest crimes.
A Campaign 18 Months in the Making
President Donald Trump signed EO 14203 on February 6, 2025, placing Karim Khan, the ICC’s then Prosecutor at the top of the sanctions list, citing the Court’s arrest warrant applications concerning Israeli officials. The list grew to include four more judges in June 2025, two additional judges and both deputy prosecutors in August 2025, two more judges in December 2025, and now the Court’s president and a senior trial lawyer this month. Khan was separately removed from office in July following a disciplinary process arising from misconduct allegations, a development that has left the Office of the Prosecutor operating under both sanctions and leadership turnover at once. The deputy prosecutors now leading that office are themselves designated.
What is different about the August 18 designations is not that the sanctions reached the ICC’s judiciary. They already had, eight times over. It is that they reached the presidency specifically, and that the Trump administration’s public justification shifted from rejecting ICC jurisdiction in certain instances to condemning the institution in its entirety. An administration that seeks to dismantle an international court has stopped arguing about particular warrants and is now aiming to upend international accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide once and for all.
How Lawyers Can Use the Precedent of Rona v. Trump
In April 2025, Professor Gabor Rona and I sued the Trump administration in the Southern District of New York, arguing that EO 14203 violated the First Amendment by criminalizing the speech-based services we and other American lawyers, scholars, and advisers routinely provide to the ICC. These include expert analysis, evidence, training, and advocacy. EO 14203 attaches the machinery of emergency economic powers, civil fines, and criminal penalties of up to 20 years in prison, to the act of sharing legal expertise with a court. For me the threat was not abstract. My work on gender persecution, including my role as Special Adviser to the ICC Prosecutor on gender and other discriminatory crimes, sat squarely within the conduct under the order. Continuing that work meant risking prosecution. Stopping it meant abandoning survivors whose cases depend on precisely this expertise.
On July 30, 2025, Judge Jesse Furman agreed. He found that the order regulated protected speech based on content, rendering it presumptively unconstitutional, and that the government had offered no evidence sufficient to justify it. He permanently enjoined every defendant except Trump himself, consistent with the general practice that federal courts do not enjoin the president directly.
The injunction did not strike down EO 14203. It protected only the conduct of the two plaintiffs before the court. But the reasoning reached further than that narrow remedy suggests. Furman noted that the order was substantially similar to the sanctions regime the first Trump administration imposed on the ICC in 2020. He observed that it used “the exact language” a court had already found likely unconstitutional in Open Society Justice Initiative v. Trump, a ruling the government never appealed and that the Biden administration mooted by rescinding the underlying order in 2021. “In law, as in life,” he wrote, “two wrongs do not make a right.”
That history matters because the government is not testing a novel legal theory. It is repeating an argument that has failed in federal court twice, under two different iterations of the same policy, on the same constitutional ground. The judgment in Rona allowed the two of us to resume work that had been frozen for months. As the only final ruling on the merits of this sanctions regime, it offers strong support to other constitutional challenges to EO 14203. Furman’s decision reaffirmed that political objectives cannot justify punishing protected legal, academic, and professional activity.
A Growing Docket
Rona was not the only case, and Judge Furman’s was not the first ruling. Twelve days earlier, in Smith v. Trump, Judge Nancy Torresen of the District of Maine preliminarily enjoined enforcement against two other U.S. human rights advocates, finding the order’s restriction on speech-based services to the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor likely failed even intermediate scrutiny because it restricted substantially more speech than any asserted security interest could justify. That case remains pending in Maine.
A third case ended before any court could rule on the merits. In May 2025, Human Rights First sued on behalf of Eric Iverson, a U.S. Army veteran who has served as a prosecutor at the ICC since 2010. He leads the Court’s Darfur investigations, including the genocide case against former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and was the first American to try a case before the Court. The executive order called for Iverson to stop working on atrocity investigations the United States itself has supported for two decades. Little more than a week after Iverson filed suit in the District of Columbia, the government issued a Treasury Department license permitting his work rather than defend the order in court, a concession Human Rights First described as the administration declining to defend the sanctions at all. Whatever else that episode shows, it is not the posture of a government confident in the constitutionality of its own policy.
The Albanese family’s suit has followed a rockier path. In February 2026, Francesca Albanese’s husband and daughter, both U.S. citizens, sued over her designation, since Albanese cannot bring suit in her own name under U.N. rules governing Special Rapporteurs. In May, Judge Richard Leon of the District Court for the District of Columbia granted them a preliminary injunction. The D.C. Circuit stayed that injunction, and two judges on the panel signaled that the claim may fail for a reason distinct from the merits reached in Rona and Smith. Albanese is a foreign national acting outside the United States, a distinction the panel suggested may place her conduct outside the First Amendment’s protection even where the underlying sanctions authority is identical. That appeal remains pending, and the sanctions against Albanese remain in force in the meantime.
In June, three sanctioned ICC judges, Kimberly Prost of Canada, Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, and Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, filed their own suit in the Southern District of New York, the first time sitting judges of the Court have personally challenged their designations before a U.S. court. Their complaint describes sanctions under IEEPA as “tantamount to the financial death penalty,” as they cut the judges off from banking services, credit cards, and in some cases health insurance. The complaint argues that the designations exceed the statute because no genuine national emergency exists and that they violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment. The Open Society Justice Initiative, which counts the case as the fifth legal challenge to EO 14203, represents Judge Prost, with Foley Hoag, the firm that served as lead counsel in Rona, as co-counsel.
Challenges continue to mount. In July, lawyers filed a challenge to EO 14203 in the Southern District of New York on behalf of DAWN and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide. The two advocacy groups argue that EO 14203 unconstitutionally burdens the ability of Americans to pursue Palestine-related human rights advocacy and to work with sanctioned organizations, for nothing more than urging the ICC to investigate Israeli and American nationals. They note that both had asked the Office of Foreign Assets Control to confirm their proposed work was permissible and received no response. On August 11, the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute filed a challenge, also in the Southern District of New York and at least the sixth federal challenge to the order. The complaint pleads First and Fifth Amendment claims and a claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It argues that the sanctions exceed the president’s statutory authority under IEEPA and violate the Administrative Procedure Act. Where the orders in Rona and Smith extended only to the plaintiffs before the court, the four organizations asked the court to strike down the sanctions regime in full. Their complaint also described effects reaching well beyond U.S. borders. Non-U.S. banks and technology companies, wary of losing access to the American financial system, have refused service to sanctioned individuals and to the Palestinian human rights organizations the plaintiffs work with. The administration issued the August 18 designations exactly one week into that litigation.
These cases test different facets of the same underlying question, whether the executive branch can use emergency economic powers to punish people for engaging in lawful, independent judicial and prosecutorial work. On the U.S. side of that question, the government’s record is unfavorable. Two courts reached the constitutional merits and ruled against it, one on a preliminary basis. In a third case the government issued a license and walked away rather than defend the order. Those three, Rona, Smith, and Iverson, all concerned sanctions tied to specific conduct, providing services connected to a designated individual. The newer suits, from the ICC judges and from advocacy organizations challenging the chill on their own protected work, press the question on broader ground still. The August 18 designations arrived alongside an explicit statement that the goal is to disable the institution altogether. If courts found the narrower version of this policy unconstitutional, the broader version the administration is now describing publicly does not become easier to defend.
That represents a belligerence that seems to mark this administration in every arena. Having lost this argument repeatedly, the administration has responded not by narrowing its approach but by escalating it. It expanded first to the deputy prosecutors, then to the judges who authorized the warrants it objects to, and now to the president of the Court and a member of the prosecution team. The government’s legal theory has not become stronger. The list of people willing to test it in court has instead become longer.
What Comes Next
None of this guarantees a particular outcome in the pending cases. Smith remains before the district court in Maine. The judges’ suit will have to contend with the same foreign-nationality headwinds the D.C. Circuit flagged in the Albanese appeal. Litigation is not linear. But a pattern is building. Whenever a U.S. citizen has brought the claim, on facts tied to specific ICC-related work, the sanctions regime has either failed constitutional scrutiny or been abandoned by the government before a court could rule.
The August 18 designations do not change that record. They raise the stakes on it. The administration is asking, more explicitly than before, whether it can use emergency economic powers to render an international court incapable of functioning, and whether it can do so by threatening every U.S. lawyer, scholar, and advocate whose work touches the ICC. When powerful states deploy coercive measures against courts, prosecutors, and those who assist them, the capacity to pursue accountability for atrocities anywhere is directly compromised. Federal courts have already said no to this administration. Whether that holds at institutional scale is the question the litigation now moving through the Southern District of New York, and the appeal behind it in the D.C. Circuit, will decide.
