ICC slams US decision to sanction the court's president and a senior prosecution lawyer

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The International Criminal Court on Wednesday slammed the latest U.S. sanctions targeting senior ICC staff, including its president, as a “flagrant attack” on the global tribunal's 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 ICC senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, who is from Senegal, with sanctions that freeze any assets they have in U.S. jurisdictions or come into contact with the U.S. financial system.

The Trump administration has now slapped sanctions on nine of the ICC's 18 judges, both of its deputy prosecutors, its former chief prosecutor and one other prosecution office staffer, the court said. The U.S. 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.

In a statement, 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 the court “will continue to fully discharge its mandate with independence and impartiality.”

In a statement Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio branded the ICC “a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate.”

The move came weeks after Rubio announced that the U.S. was launching a “sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to U.S. sovereignty.”

Rubio said he will pressure the court’s 125 member states to withdraw from the institution, sanction organizations that work with the court and ban staff from traveling to the United States.

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's decision to quit the court to be formalized.

The sanctions can impact the daily lives of court officials. They prevent the ICC officials and their families from entering the United States, block their access to even basic financial services making even going to a grocery store difficult.

Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, who was sanctioned last year, lost access to her credit cards, and Amazon’s Alexa stopped responding to her. “Your whole world is restricted,” she told The Associated Press after she was targeted.

Japan also criticized the sanctions after Akane was sanctioned.

“The announced measures are very unfortunate,” Toshihiro Kitamura, press secretary at Japan’s Foreign Ministry, said in a statement Wednesday.

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. “Japan will remain committed to strengthening the rule of law in the international community, while maintaining communication with related countries.”

Balkees Jarrah, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, called the sanctions “the latest example of the Trump administration’s utter contempt for international law and a naked attempt to shield American and Israeli officials implicated in serious crimes from justice.”

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, says that Trump’s executive order last year targeting the Hague-based criminal court and the U.S. sanctions issued against a U.N. human rights expert and three Palestinian rights groups represent a “blatantly illegal attack on international justice and should be struck down,” according to a press release.

Associated Press journalists Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C., and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.