An American president declares a "national emergency" over a court ruling against one of his allies, and then freezes the bank accounts of the judge who presides over that court.

"The US government's decision to sanction two more ICC officials, including the court's President Tomoko Akane, is an affront to victims around the world and a naked attempt to shield American and Israeli officials implicated in serious crimes from justice."

– Kanae Doi, Japan director, Human Rights Watch, August 19, 2026

The United States has spent two years trying to unmake the International Criminal Court. What began as diplomatic grumbling has metastasized into a sanctions regime that now reaches the president of the ICC herself, Tomoko Akane, a Japanese judge who leads the court in The Hague. The list of people Washington has put under financial siege is long: ICC judges and prosecutors, a United Nations special rapporteur, and three of the most respected Palestinian human rights organizations in the world. And on August 11, four American rights groups went to federal court in New York and did the thing Washington least wants them to do. They sued.

The emergency that isn't

The legal machinery started with Executive Order 14203, signed by Trump on February 6, 2025, and titled "Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court." The order rests on a finding that the ICC "has engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel." It then does something extraordinary: it declares a national emergency.

That word, "emergency," carries real legal weight. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was passed, after years of presidential overreach, precisely to constrain when a commander in chief can invoke wartime powers in peacetime. Its whole point was that emergency authority "will be utilized only in time of genuine emergency." Trump did not find an emergency. He found an arrest warrant.

The ICC had issued warrants, in 2024, against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza. The warrant is the thing Washington calls an emergency.

The order is blunt about the logic. Any ICC effort to "investigate, detain, arrest, or prosecute a U.S. person or foreign national of a U.S. ally" now "constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States." In other words: if the court touches an American or an Israeli, the United States is in a state of national peril.

Who is on the list

The reach of the order keeps expanding. To date it has covered ICC judges, senior prosecutors, three Palestinian human rights groups (Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights), and Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

Then came the escalation. On August 18, the State Department designated two more officials: Tomoko Akane, the president of the ICC, and Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese senior trial lawyer. The same week, on July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced what the department now openly calls a campaign to "dismantle" the court.

Sanctions here are not travel advisories. They are frozen and closed bank accounts, rejected financial transactions, cut off digital services, and bans on entering American soil. And they reach back to anyone who helps the sanctioned people. Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, supporting a sanctioned person or entity, including by offering "advice, training, education, information, legal representation, analysis, or other assistance," carries a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and 20 years in prison.

The complaint in the New York suit describes this part as "the 'financial death penalty.'" That is not lawyerly exaggeration. It is what the law says.

The lawsuit

On August 11, 2026, the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants are a who's who of the enforcement apparatus: Trump, Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the State, Treasury, and Justice departments.

The core claim is that the order is unconstitutional. It violates the First and Fifth Amendments and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It exceeds presidential authority. And the "national emergency" it invokes "has no basis in fact."

The plaintiffs also describe, in their own words, what the sanctions actually did to them. They say the regime "has resulted in an environment of fear and uncertainty, chilling the freedom of association." As a result, the four organizations have stopped doing the work they exist to do: representing war-crime victims as legal counsel, filing submissions with the ICC, and working with the sanctioned Palestinian groups on research, litigation, advocacy, and humanitarian aid.

Joyce Ajlouny, the general secretary of the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee, put the stakes plainly: "We are joining this lawsuit because we refuse to stay silent when the pursuit of justice is criminalized."

Translation: the administration has not threatened the people who commit atrocities. It has threatened the people who try to prove them.

"A flagrant attack"

The court in The Hague did not take the expansion quietly. On August 19, in response to the latest designations, the ICC issued a statement. "These sanctions are a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates pursuant to the mandate conferred by its States Parties from across regions," it wrote, adding that the measures "undermine the rule of law."

The court said that when "judicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk." It said it would continue its work.

Around the court, nearly the entire rest of the world has registered the same objection. ICC member states, the EU, the UN Secretary-General, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and independent UN experts have all condemned the sanctions. And it is not the first time a federal court has pushed back: in 2025, judges in New York and in Maine found the order violated the First Amendment and blocked enforcement against the plaintiffs in those cases. The New York suit is expected to be consolidated with a second, similar case filed in July.

The part nobody in the White House wants you to see

The order contains a sentence that the rest of it is built to conceal. Trump writes that the militaries of the United States and Israel "strictly adhere to the laws of war."

That claim does not survive contact with the court's docket. The Palestine investigation that produced the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants did not materialize in a vacuum. And the hypocrisy is structural, not rhetorical. The same ICC that the United States now calls an "extraordinary threat" is a court the United States supported, for years, when it was investigating countries Washington did not like, including the pursuit of a warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin. The jurisdiction the administration now calls "baseless" is a principle of the Rome Statute: a court can prosecute crimes committed on the territory of a state party, whoever committed them. Palestine is a state party. That is all the jurisdiction needs.

So the United States has not discovered that the ICC overreached. It has discovered that the ICC works. It works now, and it works against people Washington calls friends, and that is the entire problem.

The question

A country that has spent decades calling itself the lead architect of the postwar legal order is now in federal court defending the idea that its own allies should be exempt from that order, and that a judge who refuses to agree should be denied a place in the banking system.

The administration insists it is protecting American sovereignty from a foreign court it helped build. The rights groups suing it insist sovereignty does not mean impunity, and that a judge is not a threat just because her rulings are inconvenient.

One of them is about to be decided by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. The other, that a country can sanction a court into silence, is something the world has already decided. The ICC issued its warrant, named its targets, and survived. The question the suit will really answer is narrower and stranger: whether a president may declare an emergency against a verdict, and whether the law will let him.