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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has launched a sweeping campaign to undermine the International Criminal Court that could include further sanctions and other measures.
In a video posted on X and a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio vowed to “dismantle” the court, claiming it posed “an intolerable threat to US sovereignty.”
“The ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts and the force of so-called international law,” Rubio said in the video.
Rubio added that the ICC “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system,” and that it has moved from being a “narrow backstop” charged with prosecuting “only the gravest offenses…when a nation’s courts were unable.”
The State Department said in a statement that the campaign will “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
It said the court “claims the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest.”
“Americans never signed up for this, and all American presidents since the ICC’s ratification have maintained that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Americans,” the department’s statement said.
‘No diplomatic option off-limits’
It marks a sharp escalation in ongoing US efforts to isolate the Hague-based institution, on which the Trump administration had already imposed sanctions.
The US has previously targeted individual court officials it deems a threat to US interests, but the new “whole of government” campaign will pressure other nations “to withdraw from the ICC and cut off any financial support to the court,” according to a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“No diplomatic option will be off-limits in the campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans,” the State Department wrote in its statement.
Among the actions the US government plans to take is “increased scrutiny of nations that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”, according to the statement.
It also calls upon “nations that partner with American law enforcement and the US military” to “reject the ICC’s purported authority to prosecute American officials and servicemen”.
The announcement immediately drew condemnation from international legal experts. Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch wrote on X that the Trump administration wants to “to be able to commit war crimes with impunity even on the territory of governments that have joined the International Criminal Court”.
“Rubio is dressing up his quest for impunity for American war crimes abroad under the label of national sovereignty, which ignores the sovereign right of other nations to invoke the ICC for crimes committed on their territory,” Roth said.
“He makes it sound like the ICC acts out of the blue anywhere it wants when in fact it acts only against crimes committed on the territory of states that have invited it,” he added.
The ICC only has jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed in states that are party to the Rome statute, the 2002 treaty that established the court. The court has never opened investigations into crimes committed on American soil, and the United States has not ratified the treaty.
Additional sources • AFP