ICC Judges Sue Trump Over IEEPA Sanctions

ICC Judges Sue Trump in Manhattan Over IEEPA Sanctions

Three sitting ICC judges have sued the Trump administration in the Southern District of New York, calling US sanctions a "financial death penalty" that exceeds IEEPA and coerces the court's bench.

Three sitting judges of the International Criminal Court filed suit against President Donald Trump and senior administration officials in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on June 24, 2026, arguing that the sanctions imposed on them under Executive Order 14203 exceed the president's authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and are designed to coerce the ICC bench. The suit, brought by Canadian Judge Kimberly Prost, Ugandan Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa and Beninese Judge Reine Adelaide Sophie Alapini-Gansou, is the first time individual sitting judges of an international tribunal have personally sued a US president to unwind a sanctions regime — a test case whose outcome will define whether Washington's most powerful economic tool can be aimed directly at the world's permanent war-crimes court.

What the complaint says

The complaint, first reported by Al Jazeera and Reuters, asks the court to declare the designations unlawful and enjoin their enforcement. It frames the sanctions as retaliation for two lines of ICC work: the court's 2020 authorization to investigate alleged US conduct in Afghanistan, and its November 2024 arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as reported by the BBC.

The judges say the effect is total. According to the filing quoted by Al Jazeera:

"The Sanctions Regime … is designed to exert extra-judicial pressure on these judges and their colleagues on the ICC bench by targeting their financial and other personal interests, with the objective of punishing them for prior judicial decisions and coercing them into prioritizing their private interests over deciding cases on the basis of the law and facts."

The complaint calls IEEPA designations "tantamount to the financial death penalty," noting the plaintiffs can no longer use credit cards, access banking services, use Amazon or Google, book travel, or, in some cases, obtain health insurance. Judge Prost told the Associated Press in December 2025 that Amazon's Alexa had stopped responding to her and that her purchased e-books "vanished" from her device, per Al Jazeera's reporting.

The statute at the center

The lawsuit turns on IEEPA — the 1977 statute that anchors the modern US sanctions system. IEEPA lets the president "regulate" foreign economic transactions only after declaring a national emergency in response to an "unusual and extraordinary threat" originating "in whole or substantial part outside the United States," according to a Congressional Research Service report. The judges argue there is no such threat: an international tribunal exercising jurisdiction granted by 125 sovereign states cannot be described, in law, as a foreign national security emergency.

The primary document at issue is Trump's Executive Order 14203, signed February 6, 2025, which declares that the ICC's "illegitimate assertion of jurisdiction" over US personnel and those of unconsenting allies "constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States." The order authorizes asset freezes and entry bans against non-US persons "directly engaged in or otherwise aiding" ICC efforts to investigate a "protected person" — defined to include US nationals and nationals of allies such as Israel. Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan was designated four days later, according to Human Rights Watch.

The plaintiffs also invoke the Berman Amendment, the 1988 carve-out that shields informational materials from IEEPA authority — a hook their predecessors used successfully against Trump's 2020 order, and against the same-year TikTok and WeChat orders.

The precedent that hangs over this case

The last time a US president sanctioned ICC officials, a federal judge blocked him. In 2020, the Open Society Justice Initiative and four law professors sued Trump's first-term Executive Order 13928 in the same Manhattan courthouse. On January 4, 2021, Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted a preliminary injunction on First Amendment grounds, according to a Cambridge University Press summary in the American Journal of International Law. President Joe Biden rescinded the order in April 2021, mooting the case before appellate review.

That history matters two ways. It gives the current plaintiffs a friendly template — including standing arguments — inside the same district. But it leaves the substantive IEEPA question undecided by any appellate court, meaning the 2026 suit is, effectively, the first real merits test of using emergency economic powers against a foreign court's judges.

The 2020 plaintiffs were American academics claiming their speech was chilled. The 2026 plaintiffs are the sanctioned targets themselves — foreign nationals, sitting judges of an intergovernmental body. That is a harder standing posture in some respects, but a cleaner one on the merits: the injury is not hypothetical. It is a frozen bank account and a canceled credit card.

The parallel IEEPA fight the judges are borrowing

The judges' timing is not accidental. Trump's 2025 use of IEEPA to impose across-the-board tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico has already been rejected by federal courts. A CRS legal sidebar notes that in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, a US district court held IEEPA does not authorize tariffs at all, finding the tariffs "unlawful" and blocking them. The Court of International Trade reached a similar conclusion in V.O.S. Selections.

That line of cases sharpens the ICC judges' argument in two ways. First, courts have shown appetite to police IEEPA's "unusual and extraordinary threat" limits under the Yoshida "reasonable relation" test — the argument that the president's chosen means must actually address the declared emergency, per CRS analyst Christopher Zirpoli. Second, the tariff rulings puncture the political-question deference courts often extend to sanctions.

A ruling against the ICC sanctions would not just protect three judges. It would carve a substantive limit into a statute that has, since 1977, sat at the center of every modern US sanctions program from Iran to Russia to fentanyl trafficking.

Who benefits, who loses

The immediate beneficiaries are obvious: the ICC's bench, its 125 states parties, and — analytically — the Palestine and Afghanistan case files, which the sanctions were designed to slow. The ICC's president, Judge Tomoko Akane, called the executive order an attempt to "harm the Court's independence and its impartiality and deprive millions of innocent victims of atrocities of justice and hope" in a statement issued on February 7, 2025.

The losers, if the judges win, are less obvious. A court ruling narrowing IEEPA's reach over foreign officials would ripple into every sanctions program that targets individual foreign judges, regulators, or prosecutors — a tool the US uses against Venezuelan officials, Chinese human-rights enforcers, and Russian security services. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has quietly worried about this since 2020, when it declined to be publicly out front on the first ICC order.

Israel and its US backers lose the most in political terms. The sanctions were designed to make ICC judges pay a personal price for the Netanyahu warrant. Unwinding them would signal to the Hague that the price can be absorbed — and that the next warrant can be issued without a career-ending banking blackout.

The European angle Washington underestimates

Slovenia — home to sanctioned Judge Beti Hohler — asked the European Commission in June 2025 to activate the EU's blocking statute against the ICC designations. The mechanism, dormant since it was last aimed at US sanctions on Cuba and Iran, would prohibit European companies from complying with the US measures and could expose them to European liability for freezing an ICC judge's accounts.

If the SDNY case drags on — and Failla-style preliminary injunctions are slow to reach the Second Circuit — Brussels may act first. Fatou Bensouda, the former ICC prosecutor Trump sanctioned in 2020, publicly called for EU action earlier this year. A European blocking statute activation would create the awkward posture Washington has avoided since IEEPA's inception: a US sanctions program that allied jurisdictions are legally required to defy.

The state of play at the court

The ICC has kept working, but not without cost. Chief Prosecutor Khan is on leave pending a UN misconduct probe. By December 2025, the sanctions had spread to nine ICC staff, three Palestinian rights organizations, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, according to Amnesty International's briefing to the Assembly of States Parties.

The administration, meanwhile, has hardened. In a letter dated June 29, 2026 — five days after the lawsuit — Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote to Judge Akane that "the ICC has no jurisdiction over U.S. persons — anywhere in the world — and any attempt to assert such authority is illegitimate, unlawful and a direct affront to the sovereignty of the United States," per Al Jazeera's July 2 report. The Justice Department, in other words, is signaling that even a judicial defeat in Manhattan will not change the executive position.

That collision — a federal court potentially ordering the removal of foreign judges from the SDN list, while the executive publicly refuses to acknowledge the court whose judges won relief — is the second-order crisis this case is walking toward.

What to watch

• Motion practice in SDNY. Watch the government's response to the complaint and any motion for preliminary injunction. Judge assignment matters: a repeat of the 2020 Failla ruling would confirm the district's institutional posture.
• EU blocking statute vote. Slovenia's June 2025 request remains pending in Brussels. Any Council action would be the first extraterritorial defense of an international tribunal by an economic bloc.
• Assembly of States Parties, December 2026. The next ASP session in The Hague will decide whether member states pursue formal countermeasures — including possible non-cooperation findings against non-complying states like Hungary — or, as Amnesty warned in December 2025, quietly seek "engagement" with Washington on terms set by the sanctions themselves.
• Any new US designations. The October 2025 sanctioning of Palestinian NGOs and the December 2025 sanctioning of two more judges show the executive continues to escalate. Another designation during litigation would sharpen the injunctive posture.

The Bottom Line

The judges' lawsuit is not really about three careers. It is the first serious judicial test of whether IEEPA — the load-bearing statute of the entire modern US sanctions architecture — can be used to punish foreign judges for judicial decisions. If Manhattan sides with the ICC bench, Washington loses a tool it has assumed was untouchable; if it sides with Trump, the court in The Hague becomes a permanently sanctioned institution, and every future warrant against a US or allied official carries a built-in personal financial penalty for the judges who sign it.