Judge Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin cannot use her credit card. She cannot access banking services. She cannot book travel through ordinary platforms, obtain health insurance through normal channels or use Amazon or Google. She is a sitting judge of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She was sanctioned by the United States government in June 2025 for participating in the court's investigation into Israeli conduct in Gaza. Last week, alongside two colleagues, Judge Kimberly Prost of Canada and Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, she sued in federal court arguing that the sanctions imposed on her are unlawful and designed to punish her for doing her job.

She is asking the United States of America for the right to function as a judge.

The lawsuit, the first by sitting ICC judges, is a document of extraordinary historical significance. Not because of what it will produce — federal civil litigation against a sitting US administration moves slowly, and a final verdict, if one comes at all, is years away. But because of what it reveals about the condition of the accountability architecture the world built after 1945 and what the most powerful state on earth has spent the last two years systematically doing to it.

What the United States Built

The International Criminal Court did not emerge from the traditions of states that had nothing to do with American power. It emerged directly from the principles that American lawyers and statesmen helped articulate at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946, codified into international law through decades of American-led multilateral effort, and finally given institutional form through negotiations in which the United States was a central participant. The Clinton administration sent David Scheffer as chief negotiator to Rome in 1998, where American officials participated actively in drafting the Rome Statute. The US delegation drafted significant parts of the final version. The principles that became the Rome Statute, specifically no immunity for heads of state, individual criminal responsibility for mass atrocity and the complementarity principle, trace directly to the Nuremberg Charter that Robert Jackson helped write in 1945 and to the UN General Assembly resolution affirming those principles in 1946, which was, as the ICC's own former president has noted, the brainchild of the US Government. The United States ultimately voted against the Rome Statute in 1998, citing concerns about American soldiers being subject to prosecution. Clinton signed it in December 2000 without submitting it for Senate ratification. George W. Bush unsigned the Rome Statute in May 2002 and passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, which authorised military force to free any American detained by the court — legislation that became known in European capitals as the Hague Invasion Act. Obama re-established a working relationship. Biden rescinded Trump's first-term sanctions against ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and co-operated on Ukraine investigations. What the second Trump administration has done is qualitatively different from anything that preceded it.

The Systematic Dismantling

On February 6, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14203, titled 'Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.' The order declared ICC investigations targeting US nationals or nationals of allied states a national emergency, specifically 'an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.' It authorised asset freezes and travel bans against any foreign national who participated in or supported those investigations. The declared emergency was not a terrorist attack or a military crisis. It was judges doing their jobs. Within a week, Secretary of State Rubio sanctioned ICC Chief Prosecutor Khan. In June 2025, Rubio added four ICC judges to the sanctions list, including Alapini-Gansou and Bossa, describing them as having 'actively engaged in the ICC's illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel.' In August 2025, four more judges were sanctioned, including Prost, who had in 2020 authorised the court's investigation into US personnel in Afghanistan, a decision she made five years before being sanctioned for it. In December 2025, two more judges were added. By the time the three plaintiffs filed their Manhattan lawsuit in June 2026, the administration had sanctioned at least 11 ICC officials including judges, prosecutors and deputy prosecutors. The sanctions regime is not targeted at specific acts of alleged misconduct. It is targeted at the exercise of judicial functions the court was designed to perform. Prost herself noted the absurdity with precision after her designation: 'I was somewhat surprised that I would be sanctioned for something I had done five years ago, particularly because sanctions are not about punishment, they're about changing your conduct, deterring you. And of course, none of that applies to me because the investigation is dormant.' The administration sanctioned a judge for a ruling she made in 2020, in a case that is no longer active, to send a message about what she might do in future cases involving Israel. The lawsuit describes what the sanctions actually mean for the judges in their daily lives. The complaint calls it the financial death penalty: 'Due to the sanctions, Judges Prost, Bossa, and Alapini-Gansou are no longer able, among other things, to use credit cards; access banking services; use common online platforms, such as Amazon and Google; book travel; and in some cases, obtain health insurance.' This is the mechanism by which Washington is attempting to discipline the international judiciary: not through legal argument before the court, but through the practical strangulation of the judges' ability to live normal lives.

The Indian Judges and the Indian Government

Of the three plaintiffs, two are from the Global South. Bossa is Ugandan. Alapini-Gansou is Beninese. The court that was supposed to give countries like theirs a voice in international justice, accountability that colonial subjects never received and postcolonial states have rarely secured, is being dismantled by the most powerful state on earth. But the sharpest illustration of what that dismantling costs the Global South this week did not come from the three judges in Manhattan. It came from Geneva. On June 23, five days before the Manhattan lawsuit was filed, Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, former judge of the Delhi High Court, former Chief Justice of the Orissa High Court, now chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, presented a 100-page report to the Human Rights Council. The report documented that Israeli forces had deliberately targeted Palestinian children, constituting genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. 'The evidence shows that Palestinian children deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,' Muralidhar said. At least 20,179 children had been killed, representing roughly 30 per cent of all fatalities. At least 5,031 were under five. The commission submitted 7,000 pieces of evidence to the ICC to support the investigation whose judges Washington is now financially strangling. Justice Muralidhar is Indian. He is not the first. Justice Dalveer Bhandari, India's representative on the ICJ since 2012, voted with the majority in January 2024 ordering Israel to take all measures to prevent acts of genocide, and again in May 2024 ordering Israel to halt its Rafah offensive. Two Indian jurists. Two international legal bodies. The same documented evidence. The Indian government has maintained studied neutrality throughout, abstaining on UN resolutions condemning Israeli conduct across multiple votes. The administration's sanctions do not correct the ICC's historic selectivity toward African defendants. They make it permanent on a different axis. The judges being sanctioned are not being sanctioned for pursuing African leaders. They are being sanctioned for pursuing an American ally. The message to the Global South is not that the court will become more equitable. It is that the court will be prevented from functioning whenever its investigations point in a direction Washington finds inconvenient, and that the government of the Indian jurists documenting genocide in Geneva and The Hague will abstain rather than say so.

The Manhattan Courthouse and What It Means

The three judges filing in Manhattan are the fifth wave of plaintiffs to challenge Executive Order 14203 in US courts. The previous four lawsuits, brought by American human rights advocates and organisations, produced rulings that found the order unconstitutional as applied to Americans providing speech-based assistance to the court, a First Amendment argument that the judges themselves cannot make, being foreign nationals. Four earlier courts ruled the order unconstitutional on these grounds. The administration has appealed and sought stays, and the litigation continues. The judges' lawsuit makes different arguments. They contend that Executive Order 14203 exceeds IEEPA authority because no genuine national emergency exists. They argue the measures are arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. They argue the Fifth Amendment's due process protections are being violated by the freezing of assets without adequate process. They are asking a US federal court to tell the US executive branch that it cannot use emergency economic powers to punish foreign judges for conducting judicial proceedings. This is the situation the accountability architecture has produced. Three judges, from Canada, Uganda and Benin, are suing the United States in a United States federal court for the right to function as international judges without being financially strangled. They have no other forum available. The ICC cannot compel US compliance. The UN Security Council, where the US holds a veto, cannot act. A Manhattan federal court is the only institution with any possibility of constraining the executive order. The architecture of accountability, when turned on itself, produces this: three judges asking the country that declared their work a national emergency for the right to buy groceries.

The Architecture and Its Authors

Robert Jackson returned from Nuremberg in 1946 having built something he believed would outlast him and outlast the specific crimes he had prosecuted. The principles he articulated, specifically individual criminal responsibility, no immunity for heads of state and the non-derogability of crimes against humanity, were affirmed by the UN General Assembly through a resolution the US government championed. They were developed over fifty years of multilateral work in which American lawyers and diplomats played central roles. They became the Rome Statute, which American negotiators helped draft, which the US ultimately refused to ratify, and which the US is now actively undermining from the outside. The distance between 1946 and 2026 is not simply a matter of changed administrations or shifted priorities. It is the distance between a state that believed accountability for mass atrocity was a universal principle and a state that believes accountability is a tool to be deployed against adversaries and withheld from allies. The US championed the Nuremberg principles when they applied to defeated German officials. It is sanctioning the ICC judges when those same principles are applied to an ally it has chosen to shield. The three judges who filed in Manhattan last week are asking a question that will take years to answer and may never receive one. What they have already demonstrated by filing it is this: the accountability architecture the world built after 1945, which the United States helped design, is now being defended in a US federal court by a judge from Benin who cannot book a flight, a judge from Uganda who cannot access her bank account, and a Canadian judge who was sanctioned for a decision she made five years before she was punished for it. The court they built is the court they are breaking. The judges filing in Manhattan know the difference. The question is whether the court hearing them does.