Trump’s War on The Hague Is a Confession of Guilt -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

It takes a big energy from a government to destroy a court, and if that’s where it’s focusing its energies rather than defending itself in one, it tells you something. In its latest position Donald Trump’s administration has made it clear, we are doing to destroy the International Criminal Court not through debate but to financial strangulation. This is not foreign policy. It is bullying masquerading as unity.

The mechanics however, are as brutal as they are revealing. In February 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14203 which opened the door for asset freezes, travel bans and criminal exposure on anyone aiding to ICC’s efforts. The ruling was in response to the ICC’s 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity over Gaza, and a once-shelved investigation into supposed American war crimes and CIA black-site abuses in Afghanistan. The message from Washington is the rather crude but nevertheless unmistakable, and universal one: accountability is something only others should be subject to.

Fifteen months on, the cost is enormous. From Slovenia to Senegal, Canada to Mongolia, eleven ICC officials including nine judges and three prosecutors have been sanctioned simply for doing their jobs. Judges explain how overnight Gmail, Amazon, credit cards and banking were cut off, punishment described by one coalition of NGOs from 150 countries as a “financial death penalty”. Having declared his actions the “whole-of-government” campaign to dismantle the court “brick by brick,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio now proudly touts pressuring allied states from stepping away altogether from the Rome Statute (Reuters; Time). This is not a legal dispute. Its an assassination attempt on the planet earth’s only permanent war crimes court.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The White House doubted the ICC’s authority, since neither the US nor Israel signed the Rome Statute, yet such a treaty obliges 125 nations that did not pick up Washington’s phone call to creat an institution dedicated to stopping impunity. In this forcible telling, sovereignty is the right to protect those in its orbit accused of atrocities while deploying criminal proceedings against anyone who documents them including UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese and 3 Palestinian human rights groups, now added to the black list for the crime of advocacy.

Even America’s own courts are wincing. In Maine, a federal judge has already ruled that the federal sanctions are likely unconstitutional for infringing on the First Amendment rights of human rights defenders. Three current ICC judges filed a lawsuit directly against Trump himself in federal court in New York this past June, saying the sanctions regime is tantamount to unlawful retaliation for their independence as judicial officers. Next came a lawsuit from two advocacy groups who argued the administration had gone beyond its authority including under the very emergency-powers law it invoked.

Let there be no illusion about what this campaign defends. It is not American democracy, which needs no protection from a court it never signed up to. This is impunity for soldiers likely to have tortured detainees, and for an ally accused of famine and destruction of civilians in Gaza. It is not a show of power if the most powerful government on Earth wages economic war against unpaid international judges rather than answer the allegations. It shows a fear of precisely the kind of justice that it professes to detest.

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia