27 July 2026 | Toby Cadman, Head of Outline Chambers
Twenty-eight years ago this month, in a converted conference hall in Rome, 120 states voted to adopt the Statute of the International Criminal Court. Seven voted against. The date, 17 July, has been marked ever since as the World Day for International Justice, and it is usually an occasion for the sort of speech that congratulates everyone in the room for their commitment to accountability while avoiding the question of whether accountability is being delivered. This year the speeches will be shorter, and the room will be quieter.
On 14 July 2026, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the United States Secretary of State pledged that his government would “dismantle” the Court, “brick by brick if necessary”. Marco Rubio’s op-ed was the public face of what the State Department described as a whole-of-government campaign to systematically disable the Court’s ability to operate: travel bans on Court officials, expanded sanctions, and diplomatic pressure on allies and non-party states to resist its jurisdiction. Other governments are being asked to join. A pledge to demolish the institution, delivered as the world prepared to mark its founding, is unlikely to have been an accident of the calendar. And it did not come from nowhere. By 18 December 2025, eleven ICC prosecutors and judges had already been placed on the Specially Designated Nationals list — the instrument built for terrorists, proliferators and war criminals — on account of the cases before them. That is what the anniversary now must absorb.
There is a name for this in our own law, and it is worth using before the diplomatic vocabulary closes over the thing and makes it respectable. Perverting the course of justice has never required a live trial. It is enough to act with the intention of preventing a proceeding from ever being brought. Threaten the judge who might one day hear the case, cut off the court’s banking, ban its staff from travelling, and lean on third parties to refuse it assistance, and the absence of a live case is not a defence. It is the objective. That the actor is a state and the court an international one changes the vocabulary and not the substance. This is interference with the administration of justice, conducted in daylight and announced by press release.
Consider what is not being defended. There is no case before the ICC against an American. There is no warrant, no summons, no confirmed charge, no defendant. The Afghanistan investigation, the only proceeding to have looked seriously at US personnel, was deprioritised by the Office of the Prosecutor in 2021 and has gone nowhere against Americans since. The sanctions that provoked the judges’ lawsuit in New York were imposed over warrants concerning Israeli nationals. So were the sanctions before them. So, one is entitled to conclude, is this. The campaign is not a response to a prosecution of Americans, because there is none. It is a response to the prosecution of somebody else, and the somebody else is not a secret.
The campaign has a documentary spine. Executive Order 14203, signed in February 2025, invoked the emergency economic powers ordinarily reserved for terrorists, proliferators and serious human rights abusers, and turned them against the Court. On 6 February 2025 the Prosecutor, Karim A. A. Khan KC, was designated. Through successive tranches in June, August and December the list grew. Those affected are not fringe figures. They include the two Deputy Prosecutors, Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal, together with eight members of the bench: Vice-President Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza of Peru, Kimberly Prost of Canada, Gocha Lordkipanidze of Georgia, Erdenebalsuren Damdin of Mongolia, Nicolas Guillou of France and Beti Hohler of Slovenia. What unites them is not misconduct but portfolio: they have sat on, or advanced, investigations touching Afghanistan and Palestine. According to the lawsuit three of them filed in the Southern District of New York on 24 June 2026, they have had assets frozen in US accounts and have been cut off from credit cards, banking services and even health insurance. These are the ordinary mechanics of an asset freeze. The point is that they are being applied to the judges and prosecutors appointed to investigate, prosecute and try war criminals, rather than to a war criminal.
The first casualty is the sanctions regime itself. Targeted financial sanctions earned their legitimacy over three decades precisely because they were understood as a rule-of-law instrument: a calibrated alternative to force, deployed against those credibly linked to atrocity crimes, terrorism, grave corruption or gross human rights abuses. Their coercive power depends on a shared perception that a designation carries moral and evidential weight. Turning that machinery against sitting international judges, on account of the cases before them, inverts its logic. It signals that the list is available not only to punish wrongdoing but to punish adjudication. It invites every state with the financial reach to place foreign judges, prosecutors and investigators under sanction whenever a ruling offends it, and it blurs, perhaps irreparably, the line between sanctions as enforcement of international norms and sanctions as retaliation against them. A tool whose value lay in its association with the rule of law is being spent down to make a point against it.
The Statute anticipated conduct of exactly this character. To sanction a judge is coercive; to announce, from the Office of the Secretary of State, an intention to dismantle the tribunal she sits on is to state the coercive purpose openly. Article 70 of the Rome Statute makes it an offence against the administration of justice to impede, intimidate or corruptly influence an official of the Court, or to retaliate against one on account of duties performed. The provision exists precisely because international justice, lacking its own police force, is uniquely vulnerable to pressure on the individuals who carry it out. This is not merely an advocate’s characterisation. Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, has called the sanctions “an unacceptable assault on judicial independence, a deliberate obstruction of justice, and a grave threat to the rule of law”, warning of the “chilling message” they send to the victims who depend on judges and prosecutors for accountability. When the mandate-holder charged with protecting judicial independence reaches for the language of obstruction, it is a signal that the ordinary vocabulary of diplomatic disagreement no longer fits.
The jurisdictional argument deserves a straight answer rather than an indignant one. The claim is that the Court asserts authority over nationals of states that never ratified the Rome Statute. That is true, and it is also unremarkable. Territorial jurisdiction is the ordinary basis on which every criminal justice system on earth operates, which is why an American who commits an offence in London is tried in London and nobody files a protest. A state that has not signed a treaty does not thereby acquire an exemption from the criminal law of the places in which its nationals act. The Rome Statute does no more than allow a state party to delegate to the Court the jurisdiction it already held. One can dislike the outcome. It is harder to call it an invention. The alternative principle, that the nationals of powerful states stand beyond the reach of the courts of the territories where they operate, is not sovereignty. It is privilege, and it is the precise thing the Rome Statute was drafted to end. It’s important to recall here that the late U.S. Senator, Lindsey Graham, in a conference call with the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan reportedly stated that the ICC “[is] for Africa and thugs like Putin. It is not for democracies like Israel and the [USA]”.
There is a further consequence, and it is the one that ought to worry us most. Every autocrat facing scrutiny has spent twenty-eight years making the argument the United States has just made for them, and making it badly. Now the most powerful democracy in the world has made it on the front page, in better English. Moscow has called the Court a political instrument of the West since the warrant for Vladimir Putin.
Naypyidaw, Manila, Kinshasa and Khartoum have said the same, at length, to anyone obliged to listen. Every one of them will quote this campaign back at us, and not the criticisms, which are arguable, but the conclusion: that a state which finds a court inconvenient is entitled to break it.
Two things complicate the demolition narrative. The first is that the Court has not fractured. Its judges have continued to sit, its Assembly of States Parties has closed ranks, and the sanctioned officials have chosen litigation over retreat. The second is that the sharpest resistance has come from within the United States’ own legal order. The June action in the Southern District is the fifth challenge to Executive Order 14203, and earlier courts have found the order constitutionally infirm, holding that it imposes impermissible restrictions on the speech of those who assist the Court. A policy that its own domestic courts keep declining to enforce is not an advertisement for the rule of law it claims to defend.
None of which requires pretending the Court is beyond criticism, and this is not the day for that either. Twenty-eight years have produced a small number of completed trials at a cost that would embarrass a defence procurement programme. Complementarity is applied unevenly, which is a term of art meaning that it depends where you are. Investigations are opened with a press conference and closed with a footnote. The Office of the Prosecutor has spent much of the last two years consumed by internal crises, and has demonstrated, at some expense, that the gravest threat to the institution has an office in it. Those failures are real. They have cost the Court support it could not afford to lose, and those of us who continue to support it have said so in public and will go on saying so. But there is a difference between arguing that an institution is failing and arguing that it should not exist. The first is a call for reform, and reform is overdue. The second is a demand for a world in which whether a crime is prosecuted depends entirely on who committed it. That world existed. The Court exists because of what happened in it.
The practical question for states parties over the coming months is not rhetorical support. It is whether they will legislate. Blocking statutes, protection of Court personnel and their financial access, guarantees on travel and banking, and a flat refusal of requests to obstruct proceedings are the measures that will determine whether the Court can still function in three years. Statements of concern are cheap, and are already being drafted.
The Court has never been the thing its founders promised in Rome. It has also never been nothing. Twenty-eight years in, that remains the choice on the table, and it will be made by governments rather than by lawyers.
Toby Cadman is Head of Outline Chambers and has acted and appeared before the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and other international tribunals.
