Trump hates the ICC - "his" judges aren't on the bench

The Trump administration is slapping sanctions on four judges at the International Criminal Court over the tribunal’s investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza and in the West Bank.

The State Department said [...] that it would freeze any assets that the ICC judges, who come from Benin, Peru, Slovenia and Uganda, have in U.S. jurisdictions.

[...]

The new sanctions target ICC Judge Reine Alapini-Gansou, who is from the West African country of Benin and was part of the pre-trial chamber of judges who issued the arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year. She also served on the bench that originally greenlit the investigation into alleged Israeli crimes in the Palestinian territories in 2021.

The 69-year-old was also part of the panel of judges who issued the arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023. Last year, a court in Moscow issued a warrant for her arrest.

[...]

From Slovenia, Beti Hohler was elected as a judge in 2023. She previously worked in the prosecutor’s office at the court, leading Israel to object to her participation in the proceedings involving Israeli officials. Hohler said in a statement last year that she had never worked on the Palestinian territories investigation during her eight years as a prosecutor.

Bouth Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza, from Peru, and Solomy Balungi Bossa, from Uganda, are appeals judges at the ICC. Each woman has worked on cases involving Israel.

  AP

All women. Huh.

    

    

And, here's your "national emergency"...

I am willing to bet Trump never read this whole thing (or probably any part of it), but if you would like to read it, click here.

We've been here before.  It's not just Trump who hates the court.

The United States never joined the ICC and has consistently opposed the empowerment of an international court that could try U.S. military and political leaders under international law.

That's largely because of concerns that U.S. soldiers and civilian leaders might be put on trial, without U.S. constitutional protections, by an anti-American prosecutor in a court with non-American judges.

  Radio Free Europe

To be perfectly clear, there are very real concerns as regards US soldiers and civilian leaders being put on trial. After all, they have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in more than one or two countries.

During the 1990s, before the ICC was established, negotiators from U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration sought to give the UN Security Council the power to screen ICC cases. Such a safeguard in the Rome Statute would have given the United States and other permanent Security Council members the ability to veto cases they opposed.

But other countries refused to agree to those measures.

[...]

President George W. Bush's administration actively sought to keep the ICC from attaining jurisdiction over the United States or its citizens.

It did so by negotiating bilateral agreements with about 100 other countries to ensure U.S. citizens would have immunity from prosecution by the ICC.

President Barack Obama's administration took steps to engage with the ICC by participating with that court's governing bodies and providing support for its ongoing prosecutions.

In Trump's first term, John Bolton threatened sanctions on the court if it proceeded with an investigation into US war crimes in Afghanistan.

The ICC in 2016 said members of the U.S. military and the CIA may have committed war crimes by torturing detainees in Afghanistan.

In November 2017, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced she would request authorization from ICC judges for an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan.

Since Afghanistan is a state party of the ICC, the court can claim jurisdiction over any war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan after May 1, 2003.

[...]

But the government in Kabul has not asked for such an investigation, nor has the UN Security Council.

That means the only way for a formal probe to go ahead is for the ICC prosecutor to receive authorization from the ICC's pretrial chamber.

[...]

Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor who worked in the ICC prosecutor's office in 2010-13, says the ICC has "extremely limited investigative powers and is almost entirely dependent on cooperation" from member states to gather information. In his Just Security blog, Whiting says ICC investigators will receive "no cooperation from the Afghan government, the Taliban, or the United States."

So, what happened at that time?

Under ICC rules, the court can open an investigation if a member country requests it, if the United Nations Security Council refers a case, or if it believes that one of the crimes that fall under its jurisdiction were committed within the territory of a member state or by nationals of a member state operating in another country. It was under that third category that the court claimed authority over the conduct of U.S. nationals in Afghanistan, as well as in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland, where the CIA operated black sites.

[...]

But U.S. officials unequivocally warned the court that opposition to the investigation of American crimes was bipartisan. With political opposition from the strongest party to the conflict, the preliminary inquiry in Afghanistan dragged along for a decade. In 2017, with President Donald Trump newly in office, Bensouda finally moved to formally request the court’s permission to launch an official investigation. In 2019, the ICC’s pretrial chamber, the body tasked with authorizing a formal investigation, denied such authorization — an unprecedented decision that cited, among other things, the “political climate” surrounding the probe.

[...]

ICC prosecutors and representatives of victims successfully appealed the denial from pretrial chambers, and the ICC’s appeals chambers authorized a formal investigation in Afghanistan on March 5, 2020. In response, the Trump administration issued an executive order condemning the ICC and imposed sanctions [...] the first time the U.S. had ever taken such action against officials of an international body.

The administration also stepped up its pressure on the Afghan government, which was eager to maintain U.S. support and made a last-minute request to testify before the ICC in opposition to the appeal. When that effort failed, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Kabul; a day after his visit, the Afghan government petitioned to “defer” the ICC investigation in Afghanistan in order to allow a national investigation to take place instead. As a court of last resort, the ICC is required to give precedence to national processes — but it’s unclear whether the Afghan government was actively pursuing one. (The deferral also meant a pause of ICC investigations into U.S. torture at CIA black sites across Eastern Europe, even though those were crimes that the Afghan government was not in a position to investigate.)

[...]

The deferral essentially put a stop to the ICC investigation in Afghanistan before it could start. It also relieved ICC prosecutors of their pledge to push through with an investigation that faced powerful opposition without having to publicly capitulate to the U.S. When the administration of President Joe Biden lifted the sanctions on the ICC officials[...], it did so with the tacit understanding that the court’s probe on U.S. crimes wouldn’t resume.

[...]

[T]he new chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court — the only international body with the authority to prosecute individuals over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes — sought to reopen a previously suspended investigation in Afghanistan but with a caveat. The probe would not include conduct by the United States and its allies, including the U.S.-backed former Afghan government, all of which have committed crimes that fall squarely within the court’s jurisdiction.

The court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, who has been on the job for just over three months, wrote in a statement that his office would focus exclusively on crimes committed by the Taliban and by the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or IS-K, the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan.

[...]

The announcement dealt a blow to victims, human rights advocates, and those who had placed in the ICC their last hope to see the crimes committed by U.S. personnel and officials prosecuted in a court of law.

[...]

“This decision reinforces the perception that these institutions set up in the West and by the West are just instruments for the West’s political agenda.”

[...]

The International Criminal Court, which is based in the Netherlands, began operating in 2002, just as the U.S.-led war on terror was ramping up. Afghanistan ratified the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, in 2003, shortly after the U.S. defeated the Taliban and installed a transitional government.

[...]

In 2002, one month after the court began operating, the U.S. enacted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which sought to protect U.S. personnel from international prosecution. U.S. officials also pursued dozens of bilateral agreements to pressure other countries not to collaborate with the court.

“From the very beginning, they were trying to shield themselves from responsibility,” Raquel Vázquez Llorente, the International Federation for Human Rights’ permanent representative to the ICC, told The Intercept. “They were very scared that the court would bring their people to the Hague.”

  The Intercept