'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life

> I have no words to even argue against what I consider to be 'midieval practices' that should not even exist as a thought in 'modern' Western 'democracies' on how to deal with international relations and law. Can you point me at the legal basis for this decision apart from "because we say so"? What they did as part of their job is not illegal anywhere. The US is not required to join and help actively enforce the court's decisions.

What they did as part of their job is illegal in the US. US law specifies (22 USC 7421, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/7421) that the ICC may not prosecute Americans and the US government should do whatever it can to ensure that doesn't happen. A US court, of course, would not have jurisdiction over the actions of foreign nationals in foreign countries. But the executive, as in most if not all countries, has broad authority to impose sanctions on foreign individuals and organizations who are threatening to unlawfully injure US citizens.

Imagine that Putin set up a Transnational Criminal Court in Moscow, and judges in that court issued an arrest warrant, instructing anyone who can get their hands on Emmanuel Macron to kidnap him and bring him to Moscow to face trial for his government's actions in Mali. That would be a big problem, right? Of course the French government would try to punish the judges for doing that, and it would be more than a little silly to say they shouldn't face any consequences because Russian law authorized the warrant. This is what the US argues the ICC is doing here.

It's basically a warning against attempting to apply jurisdiction to countries that are not parties to the Rome Statute.

> That the US thinks it rules the world and is terrified enough to go after individuals who just happen to work for the wrong employer?

The sanctions are due to specific actions(i.e. rulings) taken by the individuals against US and their allies.[0]

> That other parts of the world are not allowed to have their own sense and modalities of justice?

The issue is mostly one of jurisdiction, the ICC is attempting to unilaterally impose jurisdiction on to states that never agreed to delegate authority whatsoever to the ICC.

[0] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

The crimes prosecuted by the ICC are accepted by the US as matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, so the US can have no legitimate objection to (1) any country exercising jurisdiction over them wherever they are alleged to occur, or (2) any country exercising its sovereign power to delegate its exercise of jurisdiction over them anywhere to an international tribunal, like the ICC, either generally, under specified terms (such as those in the Rome Statute), or ad hoc.

And they certainly have the least basis for doing so when the country on whose territory they are alleged to have occurred, and who would thus have jurisdiction whether or not they were matters of universal jurisdiction under international law, does so. (Which is, other than a UNSC resolution, the only way the ICC, under the Rome Statute, gets jurisdiction when the accused are not nationals of a State Party to the Statute.)

The actual objection is not the broad principle you are trying to articulate, but it is to the idea of Israel being accountable under international law for crimes for which it has the full support of the US government, irrespective of any theory of law. Trying to frame it as having a good-faith legalistic rationale is either being woefully ignorant or being as flagrantly dishonest as the US government itself is being.

The ICC is attempting to have arrest warrants enforced through cooperation with states that are parties to the Rome Statutes for claimed offenses by citizens of countries that are not party to the Rome statute. The US views this as an attack on sovereignty essentially and essentially has decided to retaliate by imposing sanctions.

> The ICC merely issues documents; everybody is free to agree or disagree with their documents. They have no power of enforcement whatsoever. The US here is taking action.

The ICC issues documents that Rome Statute signatories have agreed to enforce(whether they actually enforce in practice is another matter. Regardless it seems pretty clear that the US considers any threat of enforcement to be sufficient grounds to impose sanctions against the organization they view as attacking it.

> Can you point me at any action that the ICC has taken in the United States?

The ICC has made it difficult for the head of government of a strategic ally of the US to travel to many countries at a time when that ally is under attack by many other countries. The ICC has in effect threatened to do the same to US citizens as well. There's a bit more nuance than this but it's not hard to see why the US views the ICC as a real threat worthy of sanctions. This is not really a new thing either, the US has even strong-armed many countries into signing "Article 98 agreements" in order to ensure ICC doesn't have jurisdiction over US citizens.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...