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Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday issued a new broadside in the U.S. fight with the International Criminal Court (ICC), announcing a diplomatic effort by the Trump administration to dismantle the global tribunal.
Rubio issued the action call in an opinion article with the Wall Street Journal and a video message shared on social media.
His announcement comes after three of the Court’s judges filed a lawsuit in New York last month against the Trump administration. The lawsuit argues sanctions levied against them are unlawful.
“The U.S. is launching a diplomatic campaign with a simple message — sovereign states over globalism,” Rubio wrote in his op-ed.
“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.”
A State Department official told Reuters that the diplomatic tools include travel bans, visa revocations, increased sanctions against the ICC and affiliated organizations, and diplomatic pressure on other nations to withdraw from the ICC.
The ICC was established in 2002 to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. There are 125 countries that have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, the agreement that established the court.
Rubio in his video message accused the ICC of being “a global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited.”
In his op-ed, he accused the body of being “backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.”
The U.S. has a complicated relationship with the ICC, having never signed onto the Rome Statute, and with Democratic presidential administrations engaging more with the court compared to Republican administrations.
The Obama administration endorsed the court’s work investigating post-election violence in Kenya, and the Biden administration shared intelligence with the ICC as it developed its indictment against Russian President Vladimir Putin and a top Russian official for crimes related to kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
The Biden administration’s cooperation in 2021 reportedly led to the ICC deprioritizing investigations into U.S. service members as part of its focus on alleged crimes committed by the Afghan government and Taliban forces.
The Bush and Trump administrations have pushed back against the Court seeking to investigate the conduct of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Israel’s actions against Palestinians. A 2002 law, the American Services Protection Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, gives the president authority to defend U.S. personnel being detained, or imprisoned on behalf of the ICC.
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