Washington Widens Sanctions on ICC as Tehran Invokes 1930s Parallel

The Trump administration has widened its sanctions against the International Criminal Court in The Hague, moving beyond individual officials to target the court’s operational services and software, along with matters involving detained individuals, according to reports from Iranian outlets. Iran International reported that Washington had already sanctioned 17 senior ICC judges over the past year before this latest round.

The measures are aimed at deterring states from cooperating with the court, a goal the administration has pursued since the ICC’s chief prosecutor moved to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over the conduct of the war in Gaza. The prosecutor has refused to withdraw those warrants under US pressure, ^[1] reported. Washington’s position is that the court has no jurisdiction over Israel, which is not a party to the Rome Statute, and that its actions set a precedent that could be turned against American personnel. Israel’s case rests on its contention that Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre and the group’s use of civilian areas and tunnel networks in Gaza shaped every military decision that followed.

The sanctions have also exposed divisions among Western governments. Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia has said Israeli forces violated the laws of war in Gaza and has called for an ICC investigation, ^[2] reported, a position that sits uneasily with the administration’s stance. Critics in Europe say the US campaign undermines a court that Western states helped build after the Second World War.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, seized on that tension in a statement carried by Fars and Tasnim. According to those reports, he said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had warned that Washington would dismantle the court “brick by brick” unless US allies rein it in, and he asked Europe whether standing beside an ally meant defending international law or helping to dismantle it. He drew a parallel to the 1930s, arguing that the international order collapses not only through aggression but when force becomes normalized and the world stays silent. ^{[3] [4]} Those quotations appear only in Iranian state-linked media and have not been independently confirmed through US government channels.

The framing deserves scrutiny. Tehran has its own record before the ICC and other international bodies, including the crackdown on protesters that Iranian human rights groups have documented, and it has little standing to lecture Europe on the rule of law. Iran International reported that the United Nations, the European Union, Canada, and Japan condemned the new US measures and reaffirmed support for the court, ^[5] reported, which suggests the Iranian campaign is aimed at a narrower audience than the one it claims to address.

For the hemisphere, the stakes are practical. Latin American states, many of which joined the Rome Statute as a matter of regional legal tradition, will be watching whether sanctions reach their own courts, prosecutors, and cooperation agreements. Colombia, Argentina, and several Central American governments have relied on ICC mechanisms in cases involving armed groups and organized crime, and any erosion of the court’s operational capacity would fall hardest on those without the resources to pursue such cases domestically.

What this means for the hemisphere: Washington’s sanctions strategy is testing whether a court can survive without the cooperation of the most powerful state in the Western alliance, and whether Latin American governments that depend on international justice will follow Europe’s lead or hedge.