ICC Sanctions and the Rules-Based Order That Isn't: A Judge Says the Quiet Part

An ICC judge has publicly claimed US sanctions punish her for her judicial work on the Netanyahu warrants — a statement that strips the polite diplomatic framing off a pattern great powers have long been reluctant to name.

By Moemedi Michael PoncanaThe Hague · Washington · Global5-minute read19 Apr 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

An International Criminal Court judge has gone on the record to claim that US sanctions imposed on her personally are a direct response to her judicial duties on the cases authorising warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. The statement is unusual. Sitting international judges generally confine themselves to the parchment of their rulings and the fractional oxygen of Hague press briefings. When one of them decides to name retaliation by a permanent member of the Security Council in a public venue, the underlying legal order has already been damaged enough that the formal courtesies are no longer worth preserving.

The sanctions in question — first imposed under a Trump-era executive order, expanded through follow-on designations, and now applying to several ICC prosecutors and judges tied to the Israel and Palestine situations — are unprecedented as a matter of post-war international legal practice. The United States is not a state party to the Rome Statute. It has long maintained that the Court lacks jurisdiction over the nationals of non-member states. The sanctions regime operationalises that objection. It makes it materially costly for a sitting judge of an international tribunal to perform her lawful judicial functions.

The structural tell

A working international legal order requires two conditions. The first is that powerful states accept jurisdictional limits on their conduct that they do not unilaterally write. The second is that judges adjudicating cases against powerful states face no retaliation for adjudicating them. The post-1945 architecture never fully achieved either condition, but it approximated both well enough that the approximation was politically useful. The ICC judge's statement confirms that the approximation has failed at both levels in the Israel-Palestine context.

This is the structural symptom the "rules-based order" framework is designed to obscure. The rhetorical distinction between "rules-based order" and "international law" is older than the Rome Statute and not accidental. Rules-based order language permits selective application. It accommodates great-power exemption. It reserves to the speaker — generally Washington, London, or Brussels — the discretion to decide when the rules apply and when they do not. International law, properly speaking, does not admit that discretion as a matter of doctrine. The sanctions regime exposes which of the two frameworks is actually in force.

The counterpoint that matters

Defenders of the sanctions argue that the ICC has overreached by asserting jurisdiction over the nationals of a non-member state, that the Court's Palestine-situation investigation has drawn on tainted evidence and politicised submissions, and that the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant apply a standard that has never been applied to the conduct of any Western-aligned democracy. Each of these arguments has legal content that deserves engagement.

The jurisdictional argument has the most weight. The Court's jurisdiction over Israeli nationals derives from Palestine's accession to the Rome Statute in 2015 and the Court's 2021 determination that the territorial jurisdiction reaches conduct in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. That finding is legally colourable but contested, and reasonable jurists — including at least one former ICC prosecutor — have argued that the Court has stretched the Rome Statute beyond what its drafters intended. If the argument is correct, it is an argument for challenging the jurisdictional holding through the Court's procedural mechanisms or through a reform of the Rome Statute. It is not an argument for personally sanctioning the judges who rule on the cases before them.

That distinction matters because the sanctions regime does not engage the jurisdictional argument on its merits. It engages it by imposing financial and travel penalties on the individuals who perform the judicial function. That instrument is legally unsophisticated. It conflates the Court's institutional conduct with the personal conduct of the judges. And it establishes a precedent — now actively operating — that international judges considering cases against powerful states may expect their personal circumstances to become the target of the state they are adjudicating.

The Palestine-situation specifics

The sanctions are not a general-purpose ICC critique. They are narrowly tailored to the Israel and Palestine cases. The Court's ongoing investigations into other situations — Russia's conduct in Ukraine, the Myanmar military's treatment of the Rohingya, the Philippines drug war under Duterte, the Libya civil war — have not produced comparable sanctions responses from any major power. The selective application is structurally revealing. The United States has materially supported the ICC's work on Russia-Ukraine warrants, including the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. It has opposed, with escalating financial instruments, the Court's work on Israel.

This is consistent with the rules-based order framework. It is inconsistent with a doctrinal reading of international criminal law. The ICC is either an institution whose authority applies to all states parties and territories properly within its jurisdiction, or it is an instrument whose application is subject to the preferences of the great powers that support it. It cannot be both simultaneously without the doctrine collapsing.

What the judge's statement costs

An international judge making a public claim of retaliation by a permanent member of the Security Council crosses an institutional line that the Court has historically been careful not to cross. The cost to the Court is a loss of the diplomatic ambiguity that permits continued engagement with states that disagree with specific rulings. The benefit is the placement of a reputational marker that future sanctions regimes — against this judge, against this case, against this institution — now have to be weighed against. The judge has calculated that the marker is worth the ambiguity. Time will tell whether the Court's leadership agrees.

The broader effect is a gradual hardening of international criminal law as a domain where states are expected to choose publicly whether they support the doctrinal reading or the rules-based reading. The ambiguity that permitted the post-1998 Rome Statute architecture to function — Washington not ratifying but not destroying, most powers supporting but not enforcing — has been exhausted. The next phase will require explicit choices. The United States has made one. The Court has made another. The judge's statement is an artefact of the collision.

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