U.S. Sanctions ICC President Tomoko Akane and Senior Trial Lawyer Abdoulaye Seye

The United States on August 18 sanctioned International Criminal Court President Tomoko Akane of Japan and Senior Trial Lawyer Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal under Executive Order 14203, the authority the Trump administration has used against ICC personnel since February 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the designations in a State Department statement, accusing both officials of directly engaging in ICC efforts to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute people whose governments have not accepted the court's jurisdiction. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Akane and Seye to its Specially Designated Nationals list the same day and issued General License 12, authorizing the wind-down of certain transactions involving persons blocked in the August 18 action through September 17; the license's precise scope is defined by its full text rather than by news summaries, so readers seeking exact legal effect should consult it directly.

The action lands at a turbulent moment for the court. Three and a half weeks earlier, on July 24, the ICC's Assembly of States Parties voted to remove Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan from office over findings of serious misconduct. And in late July, Venezuela's interim government notified the United Nations that it was withdrawing from the Rome Statute — a move the State Department welcomed as evidence of the Venezuelan government's partnership with the U.S. campaign against the court. Neither the United States nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that created the ICC, and both reject its authority over their nationals.

What the Sanctions Do

Executive Order 14203, signed by President Donald Trump on February 6, 2025, authorizes the blocking of U.S. property and interests held by foreign nationals found to have directly assisted ICC investigations or prosecutions of Americans or Israelis without their countries' consent. Under OFAC's standard sanctions framework, property and interests in property of designated individuals that are in the United States or in the possession of U.S. persons are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally barred from transactions involving them unless a specific license applies.

Akane, a career Japanese prosecutor and judge, was elected ICC president in March 2024 and heads the court's Presidency, the organ responsible for its judicial administration. Reuters reported that Seye is a senior trial lawyer who worked on the prosecution team involved in the case that led to the ICC's November 2024 arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant; the ICC's official 2026 judicial-election records list him as Senegal's nominee for judge, though he has not been elected.

Rubio said the designations were made in furtherance of a campaign the State Department launched in July urging other governments to end funding and participation in the court, which officials have repeatedly called illegitimate and politicized. He has said several countries have already announced plans to leave; publicly documented cases include Venezuela and, since 2025, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, though no complete official list ties every departure specifically to U.S. pressure rather than to each country's own stated grievances with the court.

Last month, I launched a diplomatic campaign to dismantle the ICC’s threat to our national sovereignty. The Trump Administration is sanctioning ICC President Tomoko Akane and Senior Trial Lawyer Abdoulaye Seye in our unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a…

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) August 18, 2026

Reaction From The Hague and Washington

The court rejected the U.S. characterization within hours. In a statement, the ICC said sanctions targeting judges, prosecutors and staff who carry out the mandate conferred on the institution by its 125 States Parties undermine the rule of law, and that punishing judicial actors for applying the law puts the wider international legal order at risk. The court said it remained undeterred and would continue to discharge its mandate independently.

Rubio described the sanctions as part of what he called “our unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a court.” Trump has said the campaign is intended to shield Netanyahu and other Israeli officials from prosecution rather than to protect himself, a position he stated publicly in comments reported by Reuters in late July; the administration has also repeatedly cited the court's now-dormant investigation into alleged war crimes by U.S. forces in Afghanistan as a driver of its opposition.

A Court Already Under Strain: The Khan Removal

Tuesday's designations came against the backdrop of a separate crisis inside the court's own leadership. On July 24, the Assembly of States Parties voted by secret ballot — a majority of 82 of the court's 125 member states, according to diplomatic sources cited in wire reporting — to remove Karim Khan as ICC prosecutor under Article 46 of the Rome Statute, finding that he had committed serious misconduct and a serious breach of duty. The ICC's own announcement did not detail the underlying allegations, citing privacy considerations, but Khan had been on leave since May 2025 pending a U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services investigation into sexual-misconduct allegations involving a subordinate staff member, which he has denied.

Because Khan had already been on leave for more than a year, the deputy prosecutors — Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal — had already been managing the Office of the Prosecutor's leadership, administrative and operational functions before the July 24 vote; his formal removal ended his tenure but did not itself create that arrangement. Both deputies were separately placed on OFAC's sanctions list in August 2025 over their roles in ICC proceedings involving Afghanistan and Israel, meaning the Prosecutor's Office is currently led by officials who are themselves under U.S. sanctions. Khan's legal team has called his removal politically motivated, noting that it came while the court faced sustained U.S. pressure over the same cases Khan had pursued.

Prior Designations and the Broader Campaign

OFAC's public sanctions notices trace the campaign back to February 2025, when Khan became the first individual designated under Executive Order 14203. Subsequent notices show four ICC judges — Reine Alapini-Gansou, Solomy Balungi Bossa, Beti Hohler and Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza — designated in June 2025 over rulings tied to the Afghanistan investigation and the Netanyahu warrant; four additional officials, including judges Kimberly Prost and Nicolas Guillou along with the two deputy prosecutors, designated in August 2025; ICC-affiliated non-governmental organizations sanctioned that September; U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, sanctioned over her calls for ICC action against Israeli and American officials; and judges Erdenebalsuren Damdin and Gocha Lordkipanidze, designated in December 2025. The administration has not published a single consolidated rationale document tying each round to its specific triggering act, so this sequence should be understood as reconstructed from separate OFAC notices rather than as an official chronology.

Legal Pushback Mounts

The sanctions regime has drawn sustained litigation in U.S. courts, though the exact procedural status of each case would require direct review of the dockets. A federal judge in Maine found in mid-2025 that an earlier application of the sanctions to Khan likely violated the First Amendment and blocked its enforcement in that case. In June 2026, three sitting ICC judges — Kimberly Prost, Solomy Balungi Bossa and Reine Alapini-Gansou — filed their own suit, represented in part by the Open Society Justice Initiative, arguing the sanctions exceed presidential authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On August 11, four American human rights organizations — Human Rights Watch and three partner groups — filed a separate suit in the Southern District of New York arguing the sanctions unlawfully restrict their own advocacy and legal work. None of these cases has yet produced a ruling that halts the broader sanctions program.

Member States Pulling Away

The sanctions campaign has coincided with, though not been definitively shown to cause, a period of departures from the court's membership. In September 2025, the military governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger jointly announced their intent to leave the Rome Statute, calling the court an instrument of “neocolonial repression”; between June 18 and 24, 2026, the three states formally deposited withdrawal notices with the United Nations, which take effect a year after filing. The Assembly of States Parties said it regretted the decisions and noted that withdrawal does not erase obligations incurred while a state was a party to the treaty.

In late July, Venezuela's interim government under Delcy Rodriguez notified the U.N. secretary-general of its own withdrawal, with its foreign minister citing what he called the court's geographic bias against Africa and Latin America; Venezuela's National Assembly had voted in December 2025 to repeal the law ratifying the Rome Statute. The State Department publicly welcomed the move as part of “American-led efforts to dismantle” the court, calling the institution “corrupt and worthless” — official characterizations, not independently established facts. The ICC has said Venezuela's withdrawal, like the Sahel states' departures, will not affect its ongoing investigation into the country, since a state's obligations continue for matters already under examination and withdrawal takes effect only a year after formal notice, under Article 127 of the Rome Statute.

Separately, Akane has pressed European governments for stronger protection since March 2025, when she urged the European Union to extend its blocking statute — a legal mechanism that can shield European individuals and companies from foreign sanctions — to cover the court. The EU has voiced support for the ICC's independence, but whether it has taken the formal step of activating the statute on the court's behalf could not be confirmed here and would require a direct EU institutional source.

Why This Matters

Sanctioning a sitting ICC president reaches further into the court's institutional leadership than the individual-judge and individual-official designations that preceded it: Akane is, on the public record, the most senior ICC officeholder the United States has designated to date. Whether this represents a deliberate shift toward targeting the court's collective leadership, rather than a continuation of the same case-by-case pattern applied to a more senior person, is an inference rather than stated U.S. policy, and the administration has not described its rationale for Akane's designation in those terms.

The practical effect on the court's daily operations may be limited in the short term, since senior ICC officials generally have little occasion to transact within the United States for their court duties. Effects on staff recruitment, banking access for personnel, and member-state funding and cooperation are commonly cited as risks by ICC officials and outside observers, but no public financial statement, Assembly document or banking disclosure reviewed for this article yet quantifies such effects from this specific round of designations.

What Remains Uncertain

Several elements of this story are not yet settled. It is not publicly documented which countries, beyond Venezuela and the three Sahel states, have ended ICC funding or participation specifically because of U.S. pressure, as opposed to their own separate grievances with the court. The exact scope of General License 12 — which transactions and persons it covers — should be verified against its full text rather than summarized secondhand. The procedural status of each pending lawsuit against Executive Order 14203, including docket numbers and any interim rulings, has not been independently confirmed here. The Assembly of States Parties has not announced a timeline for electing a permanent successor to Khan. And whether the EU has taken, or plans to take, formal action on its blocking statute regarding the ICC remains unconfirmed.

Conclusion

The sanctions on Akane and Seye extend a confrontation between Washington and The Hague that has run continuously since February 2025, but they arrive as the court simultaneously contends with the removal of its chief prosecutor, the withdrawal or pending withdrawal of four member states, and unresolved litigation testing the legal limits of the U.S. sanctions program. Those developments are documented and connected in time; whether they are connected by cause, and where the confrontation goes from here, remains a matter for further reporting rather than settled fact.