{"id":85152,"date":"2025-08-21T02:40:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T02:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/85152\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T02:40:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T02:40:16","slug":"u-s-places-sanctions-on-four-icc-officials-including-canadian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/85152\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. places sanctions on four ICC officials, including Canadian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The International Criminal Court building in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 2019. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called the court a ‘national security threat.’Piroschka Van De Wouw\/Reuters<\/p>\n

The United States has issued new sanctions against senior officials with the International Criminal Court, including against a Canadian jurist, threatening to increase friction between Ottawa and Washington as trade talks continue.<\/p>\n

The U.S. sanctioned two of the court\u2019s deputy prosecutors as well as two judges, a French jurist and Kimberly Prost, a University of Manitoba graduate who spent nearly two decades with Justice Canada before moving overseas.<\/p>\n

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the court \u201ca national security threat that has been an instrument for lawfare against the United States and our close ally Israel.\u201d The ICC has 125 member countries, including Canada \u2013 but not the U.S. or Israel.<\/p>\n

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Mr. Rubio faulted Ms. Prost for ruling in favour of an investigation into U.S. personnel in Afghanistan. She was one of five judges who decided unanimously in 2020 to authorize an investigation into war crimes committed in Afghanistan by the Taliban, Afghan forces and members of the U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency, which operated secret detention facilities.<\/p>\n

Canada has been a leading supporter of The Hague-based court, with Canadians occupying pivotal roles in the negotiations toward its establishment in 2002. Ottawa has also provided considerable financial backing. Ms. Prost is the second Canadian to serve as a judge on the ICC.<\/p>\n

The Donald Trump administration<\/a> has criticized the court for overstepping its bounds by issuing a war crimes arrest warrant for Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and investigating U.S. military conduct. <\/p>\n

The new U.S. measures, which build on sanctions against four ICC judges in June<\/a>, raise a raft of potential issues for those named as well as institutional issues for the court in dealings with financial institutions, companies and groups with American ties.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump also directed sanctions toward the court in his first term, but the scope of his actions this year goes well beyond what he has done previously, by sanctioning judges in addition to prosecutors. <\/p>\n

President Donald Trump’s administration imposed sanctions on two judges and two prosecutors at the International Criminal Court, including a Canadian jurist. <\/p>\n

Reuters<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is incredibly disturbing,\u201d said Sara Ochs, a legal scholar at Elon University who has written on the U.S. relationship with the ICC.<\/p>\n

Those judges \u201cwere merely following their judicial obligations and authorizing investigations pursuant to guidelines set forth in the Court\u2019s governing legislation,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, this clearly shows the administration\u2019s position on international criminal justice, which is that the powerful should be able to avoid accountability for even the worst crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also raises a new set of complications for Canadian leadership, which is in the midst of trade talks with a Trump administration that has shown a willingness to respond with economic punishment to non-trade issues.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney \u201cis going to have to be pretty careful here in how he responds,\u201d said John Boscariol, an international trade lawyer with McCarthy T\u00e9trault. Any reaction will need to be weighed against how it \u201cmight impact ongoing negotiations for a trade deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The International Criminal Court is a permanent judicial body tasked with investigating and prosecuting some of humanity\u2019s worst conduct, but its lofty ideals have often clashed with the interests of individual countries, including those who are signatories to the Rome Statute that established the court. <\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Hungary said it would withdraw from the court, after its Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, declared that the arrest warrant against Mr. Netanyahu would have \u201cno effect\u201d on Hungarian soil. Last year, too, Mongolia ignored an ICC arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin stemming from the invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Italy did the same, freeing a Libyan wanted for war crimes. <\/p>\n

\u201cStates\u2019 compliance with the International Criminal Court is poor at best. This is not only the United States,\u201d said Mark Drumbl, director of the Transnational Law Institute at Washington and Lee University.<\/p>\n

Those working with the ICC, meanwhile, should not have been surprised that powerful countries would respond to the court\u2019s actions, said Prof. Drumbl, who is Canadian.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re a high-profile institution targeting national leaders and accusing them of war crimes. You don\u2019t think this is going to have blowback?\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo be shocked that this happened strikes me as a little bit of pearl-clutching.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Rubio, on Wednesday urged other countries to oppose the work of the court, which he called a \u201cbankrupt institution.\u201d U.S. allies should keep in mind that for many, their \u201cfreedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

France, however, declared its \u201cunwavering support\u201d for the ICC, while the court itself decried what it called an affront to \u201cthe rules-based international order and, above all, millions of innocent victims across the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neither Ms. Prost nor Global Affairs Canada responded to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Canada already has in place the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act which allows the Attorney-General, in tandem with the Foreign Minister, to prohibit people in Canada from abiding by certain foreign sanctions. That law has been most commonly used with companies connected to Cuba, which has spent decades under a U.S. economic embargo but remains a Canadian trading partner.<\/p>\n

The ICC sanctions \u201cshould be interpreted as a really hostile act\u201d to all countries that support the court, said Jens Iverson, an assistant professor in international legal studies at Leiden University who knows Ms. Prost. They should be seen as the U.S. \u201cabusing the power it happens to have because in the past it\u2019s been viewed as a rule of law country,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe question is what friends of the court are going to do,\u201d he added, and whether those countries \u201chave other priorities than defending the rule of law, the court and their own nationals.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The International Criminal Court building in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 2019. U.S.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85153,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,44,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-85152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-alberta","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-news","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}