The US Treasury sanctioned International Criminal Court President Tomoko Akane on Tuesday.
Any assets she holds in the United States are now frozen, and she’s largely cut off from the American financial system. Senior ICC trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye got hit with the same penalties.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio broke the news on social media, saying the administration was sanctioning Akane and Seye “in our unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a court.”
Akane, a Japanese judge who has led the ICC since March 2024, and Seye, a Senegalese trial lawyer, will be barred from transactions with any US person or entity starting September 17. In practice the reach goes further than the legal text.
Banks tend to treat sanctioned officials as untouchable, severing ties well beyond what’s technically required to avoid getting caught up in US penalties themselves.
This is the latest move in a campaign the Trump administration has run against the court since February 2025, when it first sanctioned ICC officials over the arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Those warrants, issued in November 2024, accused the two of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. More than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors have now been sanctioned.
Rubio called the court “a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate.” The ICC answered the same day, saying the sanctions “undermine the rule of law” and warning that threatening judges for applying the law puts the entire international legal order at risk.
REMEMBER: the US signed the Rome Statute that created the ICC back in 2002 but never ratified it, so it was never bound by the court’s jurisdiction to begin with. Israel isn’t a member either. Neither is Russia, which didn’t stop the ICC from issuing a warrant for Vladimir Putin in 2023 over the war in Ukraine. Washington had no objection to that one tho.
The sanctions are drawing legal challenges on multiple fronts. In June, three ICC judges sued the Trump administration, calling the measures “arbitrary and capricious.” Last week, four human rights groups filed a separate suit in a New York court, arguing the sanctions block victims of war crimes from pursuing justice through the court at all.
Akane addressed the earlier round of sanctions back in February 2025, saying she regretted an order that would harm the court’s independence and “deprive millions of innocent victims of atrocities of justice and hope.” The institution she leads was built as the legal answer to the world wars and the Holocaust. Now its own president can’t hold a bank account in the country that helped write the treaty that created it.
