Two human rights advocacy groups are suing the Trump administration in a bid to block sanctions imposed on the International Criminal Court (ICC) last year, arguing the designations have had a “chilling effect” on their work related to Palestine.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York, challenges an executive order issued by President Trump in February 2025 that accused the ICC of engaging in “illegitimate and baseless actions” against Israel and the U.S. by pursuing war crimes cases against Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for alleged human rights abuses in Gaza.
The executive order has also been used to impose sanctions on ICC prosecutors and judges, Palestinian human rights groups and Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territory.
Lawyers for Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (TAAG) argued in a 43-page complaint that the executive order has forced the group to cease filing submissions to the ICC and coordinating with Albanese and others in violation of the First Amendment.
It further argues that Trump’s order exceeds his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which prohibits a president from using sanctions to restrict “personal communications” or the transmission of “information or informational materials.”
“Congress wrote safeguards into the law to prevent it from being used as a cudgel to silence viewpoints that the government finds unfavorable and the Trump Administration has blown past those restraints,” Joseph Pace, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
“The U.S. government has the largest megaphone in the world and it is perfectly capable of pleading its case—or Israel’s,” he added. “What it cannot do is bar Americans from sharing a contrary perspective with the ICC, much less criminalize contact with non-American human rights defenders whose only ‘misdeed’ was calling for justice for U.S. and Israeli crimes.”
Just Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a diplomatic effort to “dismantle” the ICC, an international tribunal created in 2002 to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“The U.S. is launching a diplomatic campaign with a simple message — sovereign states over globalism,” Rubio wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”
An ad hoc committee of the United Nations led to the ICC’s establishment in the Rome Statute. The U.S. initially signed the Rome Statute but later withdrew its signature and did not ratify the treaty, which means it is not a party to the ICC, which is based in The Hague, Netherlands.
“Activist groups seeking to enable further ICC overreach are proving Secretary Rubio’s point: The ICC poses an intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty; it claims the authority to prosecute and even imprison Americans as well as nationals of U.S. allies that, like the United States, have never accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction,” a Trump administration official told The Hill on Thursday.
Three of the court’s judges have also sued in New York, arguing that the sanctions levied against them are unlawful.
A federal judge earlier this year sided with Albanese in a separate lawsuit brought by her husband, finding that the administration’s sanctions against her were likely unconstitutional because they appeared to directly target her speech criticizing Israel.
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