International Criminal Court officials described the far-reaching impact of U.S. sanctions on their daily lives.
International Criminal Court (ICC) judges and prosecutors have been fired by banks, credit card companies and tech giants including Amazon as a result of sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration over war crimes investigations into Israeli and American officials.
The Associated Press reported Friday on the full and punitive impact of U.S. sanctions on six judges and nine staff members of the Hague court, including the chief prosecutor.
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The measures, introduced by President Trump in an executive order earlier this year, cut off access to basic financial services and daily activities such as online shopping and email, and prevent people from entering the United States, the same restrictions imposed on figures such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was allowed to visit Alaska for a summit with Trump in August.
“Your entire world is being restricted,” Canadian Judge Kimberly Prost, one of the ICC officials targeted by the sanctions, told The Associated Press.
The ICC, the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal with 125 member states, was subject to restrictions in February, with the White House saying the measures were in response to “unlawful and baseless actions targeting the United States and its close ally Israel.”
The order follows the ICC’s move to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed during the genocidal war in Gaza.
Neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC.
“Now I’m on the list of people involved in terrorism.”
Prost, who was named in the latest round of sanctions in August, told The Associated Press that he lost access to his credit card, the e-books he had purchased disappeared from his device and Amazon’s Alexa stopped responding.
“It’s the uncertainty,” she said. “It’s a small annoyance, but it adds up.”
Prost was sanctioned for voting to authorize a court investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by U.S. soldiers and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan.
“I’ve worked in the criminal justice field all my life, and now I’m on a list of people involved in terrorism and organized crime,” she said.
Peru’s authorized judge, Luz del Carmen Ibanez Carranza, said the U.S. travel sanctions also applied to the family, preventing the daughters from attending conferences in the United States.
The sanctions threaten companies and individuals with large U.S. fines and prison sentences if they provide “economic, material, or technical assistance” to sanctioned parties, in order to induce them to stop providing services to those targets.
“When a card doesn’t work somewhere, you’re never sure whether it’s just a glitch or whether it’s a sanction,” Deputy Prosecutor Nazat Shameem Khan told The Associated Press.
Report of threat over warrant
The sanctions are reportedly just one of the measures imposed by the court to press for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant.
In July, the Middle East Eye (MEE) website reported that the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, had been warned that he and the ICC would be “discarded” if the warrant was not withdrawn.
The threat reportedly came from Nicholas Kaufman, a British-Israeli lawyer at the court who has ties to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s advisers. Mr. Khan was told by the Israeli leader’s legal adviser that he was “authorized” to submit a proposal to Mr. Khan that would allow prosecutors to “get down on the tree,” the news website reported.
In August, the site reported that Mr. Khan had been privately warned by then-British Foreign Secretary David Cameron in April last year that Britain would defund and withdraw from the ICC if it issued warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant, and that in May 2024, U.S. Republican senator Lindsey Graham also “threatened” Mr. Khan with sanctions if he applied for warrants.
In May, Khan’s office announced that he would be on leave pending the conclusion of a United Nations-led investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against him, and that two deputy prosecutors would take over his duties.
His lawyers have denied all claims of wrongdoing and said he only stepped aside temporarily due to intense media scrutiny.
