\n<\/p>\n
A US federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from placing sanctions on two US-based human rights groups for working to help the international criminal court\u2019s (ICC) investigations into war crimes in Gaza.<\/p>\n
In a 30-page order issued on Tuesday, Jesse M Furman, a judge at the US district court for the southern district of New York, granted a preliminary injunction to the two groups, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (Taag).<\/p>\n
The two organizations\u00a0sued the Trump administration this summer, challenging an executive order issued in February 2025 that imposed sanctions against the ICC.<\/p>\n
The order warned the US government would \u201cimpose tangible and significant consequences\u201d on people involved in investigations that Washington said threatened the national security of the US or its allies, including Israel.<\/p>\n
The order came after the ICC issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Both men have rejected accusations against them, and the US government also opposed the court\u2019s decision to issue the warrants.<\/p>\n
In his opinion, Furman noted that last year two law professors brought a separate lawsuit challenging the 2025 executive order, and that the court had held that the order \u201cviolated those plaintiffs\u2019 first amendment rights because it constituted a content-based regulation of their speech-based activities and did not survive strict scrutiny\u201d.<\/p>\n
Furman said that this lawsuit brought by Dawn and Taag \u2013 groups he described as \u201cAmerican advocacy organizations\u201d \u2013 raised a \u201csubstantially similar challenge\u201d. He wrote that the groups were challenging the 2025 order on \u201cboth statutory and constitutional grounds, re-upping many of the arguments made in the earlier cases\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dawn and Taag are rights groups that had worked to gather information for the ICC as it investigated allegations of war crimes against Palestinians.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe court concludes that the 2025 order likely violates plaintiffs\u2019 first amendment rights because it constitutes a content-based regulation of their speech-based activities and cannot survive strict scrutiny,\u201d Furman wrote.<\/p>\n
However, the judge stopped short of declaring the executive order \u201cfacially unconstitutional\u201d and rejected the groups\u2019 request to \u201cenjoin the president and to enter a \u2018universal\u2019 injunction barring enforcement of the 2025 order against anyone\u201d.<\/p>\n
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian on the ruling.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the US state department said in a statement to the Guardian that \u201cwe do not comment on pending litigation\u201d but added: \u201cThe Trump administration has been clear: the ICC poses an intolerable threat to US sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joseph Pace, a lawyer for Dawn and Taag, described Tuesday\u2019s decision as \u201ca victory for the first amendment and an important step in unraveling the ICC sanctions regime\u201d.<\/p>\n
And in a statement, Omar Shakir, Dawn\u2019s executive director, said: \u201cToday, a US federal court has put the brakes in a major way on the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to shield from justice the Israeli officials who have perpetrated a genocide and their US backers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dawn also said that it would \u201cimmediately resume\u201d its advocacy with the ICC \u201cto prosecute Israeli and American perpetrators of grave crimes\u201d.<\/p>\n
The ruling comes just days after the US imposed financial sanctions on the ICC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A US federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from placing sanctions on two US-based human rights groups for working to help the international criminal court\u2019s (ICC) investigations into war crimes in Gaza. In a 30-page order issued on Tuesday, Jesse M Furman, a judge at the US district court for the southern district<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[794,1336,7411,1233,1860,9532,11022,357,675,702,3604,81,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-52457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-administration","9":"tag-blocks","10":"tag-crimes","11":"tag-gaza","12":"tag-groups","13":"tag-helping","14":"tag-icc","15":"tag-inquiry","16":"tag-judge","17":"tag-rights","18":"tag-sanctions","19":"tag-trump","20":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52457","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=52457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}