\n<\/p>\n
The international criminal court on Wednesday condemned the latest US sanctions targeting senior ICC staff, including its president, as a \u201cflagrant attack\u201d on the global tribunal\u2019s independence and vowed to continue seeking justice for atrocities around the world.<\/p>\n
The state department announced Tuesday that it had hit ICC president Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and ICC senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, who is from Senegal, with sanctions that freeze any assets they have in US jurisdictions or come into contact with the US financial system.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has now slapped sanctions on nine of the ICC\u2019s 18 judges, both of its deputy prosecutors, its former chief prosecutor and one other prosecution office staffer, the court said. The US accuses the court of overstepping its mandate by investigating and seeking to prosecute senior military and political officials from countries, such as Israel and the United States, that are not members of the court.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the court said that when \u201cjudicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk\u201d. It said the court \u201cwill continue to fully discharge its mandate with independence and impartiality\u201d.<\/p>\n
In a statement Tuesday, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, called the ICC \u201ca corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate\u201d.<\/p>\n
The move came weeks after Rubio announced that the US was launching a \u201csweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the international criminal court to US sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rubio said he will pressure the court\u2019s 125 member states to withdraw from the institution, sanction organizations that work with the court and ban staff from traveling to the United States.<\/p>\n
Since then, Venezuela and Chad have announced they plan to leave the court, bringing the number of countries to pull out of the court in the past year to five. It takes a year for a country\u2019s decision to quit the court to be formalized.<\/p>\n
The sanctions can impact the daily lives of court officials. They prevent the ICC officials and their families from entering the United Statesand block their access to even basic financial services, making even going to a grocery store difficult.<\/p>\n
Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, who was sanctioned last year, lost access to her credit cards, and Amazon\u2019s Alexa stopped responding to her. \u201cYour whole world is restricted,\u201d she told the Associated Press after she was targeted.<\/p>\n
The court\u2019s oversight body, the assembly of states parties, called the sanctions an \u201cescalation\u201d that \u201crisks undermining ongoing investigations and impeding global efforts\u201d to ensure justice reaches victims of global atrocities.<\/p>\n
Japan also criticized the US move.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe announced measures are very unfortunate,\u201d Toshihiro Kitamura, press secretary at Japan\u2019s foreign ministry, said in a statement Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Japan has consistently supported the ICC in its efforts to prosecute and punish the most serious crimes of concern to the international community and to uphold the rule of law, he said. \u201cJapan will remain committed to strengthening the rule of law in the international community, while maintaining communication with related countries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yuichiro Tamaki, leader of the Japanese opposition democratic party for the people, wrote on X that Trump\u2019s sanctions were \u201coutrageous and intolerable\u201d. He urged prime minister Sanae Takaichi\u2019s government to show its support for the ICC and reach out to the US government to \u201chave it retract this unjust sanction\u201d.<\/p>\n
Balkees Jarrah, Middle East and north Africa director at Human Rights Watch, called the sanctions \u201cthe latest example of the Trump administration\u2019s utter contempt for international law and a naked attempt to shield American and Israeli officials implicated in serious crimes from justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Human Rights Watch and three other groups sued the Trump administration last week to challenge its campaign against the ICC. The complaint, filed in the southern district of New York, said Trump\u2019s executive order last year targeting The Hague-based criminal court and the US sanctions issued against a UN human rights expert and three Palestinian rights groups represent a \u201cblatantly illegal attack on international justice and should be struck down\u201d, according to a press release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The international criminal court on Wednesday condemned the latest US sanctions targeting senior ICC staff, including its president, as a \u201cflagrant attack\u201d on the global tribunal\u2019s independence and vowed to continue seeking justice for atrocities around the world. The state department announced Tuesday that it had hit ICC president Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[673,160,569,4516,10121,3373,11022,7209,531,1193,3604],"class_list":{"0":"post-51847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-attack","9":"tag-court","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-criminal","12":"tag-decries","13":"tag-flagrant","14":"tag-icc","15":"tag-independence","16":"tag-international","17":"tag-latest","18":"tag-sanctions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}