Stephen Fisher | January 18, 2026
In the early months of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, President Trump issued an Executive Order imposing sanctions on Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Later, the administration released statements expanding the order’s sanctions to other select prosecutors and judges of the ICC. That executive order and subsequent statements, issued on February 6, 2025, June 5, 2025, and August 20, 2025, placed economic and travel restrictions within the United States to those members of the ICC. The Trump administration argues that the sanctioned individuals are furthering the ICC’s illegitimate efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States and Israel, neither of which have accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC. These sanctions appear to contradict the spirit of President Trump’s executive orders from his first term and represent a clear weaponization of a system originally designed to promote human rights. These sanctions therefore could open the President to violation of international law and set a precedent of lawful sanctions for the international community.
The International Criminal Court
The ICC was established in 2002, under the Rome Statute, which granted it international jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the most serious crimes under international law, such as genocide and war crimes. Several articles of the Rome Statute state that the functions and powers of the court are limited to states that are party to the Rome Statute. Therefore, if a state has become party to the Rome Statute, the ICC will have jurisdiction over incidents occurring within that state or when the accused is a national of that state. Given this limited jurisdiction, the Rome Statute provides states with the ability to challenge and appeal cases based on improper jurisdiction.
The premises of the International Criminal Court in the Hauge, Netherlands. CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Currently, there are 125 states that are parties to the Rome Statute. One of these is the State of Palestine, which accepted the jurisdiction of the Court in 2015. Since that acceptance, several countries, including Palestine, have sent referrals to ICC prosecutors to investigate the alleged international law violations that have been occurring in Palestine due to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. In November of 2024, the ICC’s investigation of the conflict rejected Israel’s jurisdictional challenges, finding a proper exercise of jurisdiction under the basis of the territorial jurisdiction of Palestine, and issued arrest warrants for leaders of both sides of the conflict. The Court issued warrants to arrest Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, a military commander of Hamas (a Palestinian organization), Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense of Israel at the time of the investigation’s alleged violations.
United States Sanctions
The person leading this investigation and who issued the arrest warrants is Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the ICC. On February 6, 2025, Mr. Khan became the first member of the ICC to be sanctioned by the Trump administration. The sanctions included freezing his U.S. assets, blocking his entry into the U.S., and threatening sanctions to those who work with him or assist him financially. The administration argued in the Executive Order that the ICC actions threaten U.S. national security and infringe upon the country’s sovereignty, arguing that sanctions would address this threat. Following the initial sanctions on Mr. Khan, the administration released two statements over the summer of 2025, extending the same sanctions to eight additional ICC members, including judges and deputy prosecutors.
Notably, these sanctions seem to differ starkly in strategy from previously issued U.S. sanctions, which historically targeted states, groups, or individuals that were deemed to be violating human rights. A clear example of this comes from President Trump’s first term and his Executive Order 13818. This Executive Order drew authority from the Magnitsky Act, which was named after a Russian tax lawyer who was illegitimately imprisoned, tortured, and found deceased after uncovering corruption within the Russian government. President Trump’s Executive Order draws authority from a law formerly used by the U.S. to sanction those who Mr. Magnitsky had exposed or those responsible for his unlawful punishment. The Maginsky Act’s framework effectively opened the door to use governmental financial weapons against individuals who prevent efforts to bring justice to human rights offenders. A sanctions framework that once advanced a tool to support human rights and deter abuses has evolved to be used against members of an international court pursuing accountability for human rights violations.
Accountability
The following discussion considers whether these sanctions are lawful and what consequences the Trump administration might face if they are not. In 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which grants the executive branch the authority to declare national emergencies and impose sanctions to address those emergencies. Despite this broad freedom to impose sanctions as the executive sees fit, there have already been challenges to these ICC sanctions domestically. After the February Executive Order, two American human rights advocates joined forces with the ACLU to file suit against the Trump administration. In Smith v. Trump, the advocates claim to have been forced to suspend their work with the ICC to avoid being subjected to the secondary sanctions outlined in the Executive Order, which prohibit them from assisting or working with those being sanctioned. The Maine District Court, for now, has found that the advocates’ claims have a likelihood of success on the merits and has granted a preliminary injunction on First Amendment grounds, preventing the government from sanctioning the advocates for their activities.
Internationally, however, there is little customary law governing the legality of sanctions and what is deemed acceptable for extra-territorial unilateral sanctions. For example, a 2022 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, Alena Douhan, claimed inconsistency between secondary sanctions and international law. This report was met with criticism for not being based on evidence and the “damning shortcoming” of applying extraterritorial human rights obligations to states. The recurring challenge is that international law has limited power to preempt state sovereignty, making sanctions difficult to uniformly regulate.
Obtaining jurisdiction for International courts in the first place has also posed difficulties. The U.S. often challenges the international law’s ability to obtain jurisdiction over it, as is evident by the claims to the ICC’s lack of jurisdiction in the Executive Order. Furthermore, the U.S. seldom ratifies international treaties and has not accepted the authority of any international court systems. One important exception, however, is that the U.S. has ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). In Article 1 of this treaty, it states that “[torture] does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions” (emphasis added). Because the U.S. has ratified this United Nations (UN) treaty, it has granted authority to an international system, in this case the UN Committee Against Torture, to investigate whether the Trump administration has violated international law, if the Committee receives a complaint and finds an investigation appropriate.
With the forward momentum towards the Trump administration’s ICC sanctions being found unlawful domestically, these sanctions could expose the administration to potential claims violating international law. If the sanctions are found to be unlawful, President Trump and the administration could be held in violation of human rights under CAT, tying unilateral sanctions to human rights violations and providing the international community with foundational precedent on the limitations of sanctions. This would provide the international community persuasive authority for challenges to sanctions, effectively creating a framework like the Magnitsky Act for global use. On the other hand, allowing sanctions such as these invites future abuse of sanctions and will prevent international communities, like the ICC, from advocating for human rights. President Trump’s weaponization of sanctions to impede the promotion of human rights demands the development of international standards defining the unlawful use of unilateral sanctions.