When the Court Itself Goes to Court: The Full Story of Three ICC Judges Who Took Donald Trump to Manhattan

On Wednesday, June 24, 2026, something happened in a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan that has never happened in the history of the International Criminal Court, in the history of American sanctions law, or in the history of the relationship between the United States and the international legal order it helped build: three sitting judges of the world's only permanent international criminal tribunal walked into the Southern District of New York and filed a 66-page federal lawsuit against the President of the United States, his Secretary of State, his Treasury Secretary, his Acting Attorney General, and the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The judges — Kimberly Prost of Canada, Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, and Reine Adélaïde Sophie Alapini-Gansou of Benin — did not file this lawsuit because they wanted to. They filed it because the sanctions imposed on them by the Trump administration under Executive Order 14203 have, in their own words, made their lives unrecognisable. Their bank accounts were frozen. Their credit cards were cancelled. They cannot access Amazon. They cannot use Google services freely. Some of them cannot obtain health insurance. One colleague's daughter, living in the United States, had her visa revoked because of her parent's designation. Travel requires elaborate workarounds. Sending money internationally, even to family members, has become difficult or impossible. The sanctions, the lawsuit says, amount to nothing less than a financial death penalty.

And all of it — every frozen card, every cancelled account, every blocked platform — happened not because these judges committed any crime, broke any law, or acted in bad faith. It happened because they did their jobs.

The Executive Order and the Escalating Sanctions Campaign

To understand Wednesday's lawsuit, you have to understand the seventeen-month campaign that produced it, beginning from its precise starting point: November 21, 2024, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. The ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber II approved those warrants by majority vote. The decision was legal, procedural, and judicial. It was also, for the Trump administration, a provocation it was unwilling to tolerate.

On February 6, 2025 — seventeen days after Trump returned to the White House — he signed Executive Order 14203, titled Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court. The order declared a national emergency, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to claim that ICC investigations targeting American personnel or personnel of allied countries that have not consented to ICC jurisdiction constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Under that emergency declaration, the executive order authorised the blocking of US-based property and assets, the imposition of travel bans, and the suspension of entry into the United States of ICC officials, employees, agents, and their immediate family members.

The order immediately sanctioned ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, blocking his property and interests in the United States. It then directed the Secretary of State to make additional designations — and Secretary Marco Rubio obliged over the following months in a series of waves that progressively expanded the sanctions to encompass virtually the entire senior leadership of the court that issued the Netanyahu warrants.

On June 5, 2025, Rubio announced the sanctioning of four ICC judges: Slovenian Beti Hohler, Beninese Reine Alapini-Gansou, Peruvian Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza, and Ugandan Solomy Bossa. Two of the four had authorised the investigation into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. The other two had approved the Netanyahu and Gallant arrest warrants. Rubio described them as having actively engaged in the ICC's illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally Israel.

On August 20, 2025, four more judges were added to the sanctions list: Senegalese Mame Mandiaye Niang, French Nicolas Guillou, Canadian Kimberly Prost, and Fijian Nazhat Shameem. In the announcement, Rubio described the ICC as a bankrupt institution and a national security threat. The State Department press release explained that Prost was being designated for ruling to authorise the ICC's investigation into US personnel in Afghanistan — a ruling she had made in 2020, five years before her designation. Prost's own reaction to that explanation was understated and pointed: she told the Irish Times she was somewhat surprised that she would be sanctioned for something she 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.

On December 18, 2025, Georgian judge Gocha Lordkipanidze and Mongolian judge Erdenebalsuren Damdin were added, bringing the total number of sanctioned ICC officials to at least eleven, including nine judges and the chief prosecutor. The International Bar Association condemned the sanctions as politically motivated interference with the court's independence. The Dutch Foreign Minister expressed regret. The President of the European Council called the measures a threat to the independence of the international judicial institution and said they undermined the entire international legal system.

None of those statements moved the Trump administration.

The Judges Who Refused to Be Silent

The three judges who filed Wednesday's lawsuit — Prost, Bossa, and Alapini-Gansou — represent something unusual in the world of international judicial institutions. International judges do not sue governments. They work through diplomatic channels, through their institution's leadership, through statements by international organisations and allied governments. They operate within a framework in which the legitimacy of their institution depends on a certain circumspect distance from the political battles of the states whose behaviour they are charged with adjudicating.

The decision to file a federal lawsuit in Manhattan — within the American legal system, against the American executive branch — is a departure from that tradition that required careful deliberation. The judges' statement released alongside the filing explains the reasoning: the sanctions had deeply affected many aspects of our personal lives and called them an attack on judicial independence and a threat to the important work of the court to deliver justice for victims of grave crimes. They did not describe themselves as victims in the emotional sense. They described themselves as judges whose ability to do their jobs without fear of personal financial ruin had been directly compromised by an executive branch angry about their decisions.

Judge Kimberly Prost is represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Foley Hoag LLP, with representation provided pursuant to an OFAC general licence authorising US persons to provide legal services to designated individuals. The Justice Initiative, which announced the filing, described Prost as venerated for her contributions to international justice, having served as an ICC judge since March 2018 and previously held senior positions in Canada's Department of Justice, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the United Nations.

Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa, from Uganda, and Judge Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin filed alongside Prost. Alapini-Gansou sat on the Pre-Trial Chamber that approved the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Her designation is among the more directly political of the designations: she is sanctioned, in effect, for the specific vote she cast in the most consequential judicial decision the ICC has made in years.

The 66-Page Complaint: Four Legal Arguments Against the Executive Order

The lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York is 66 pages long and makes four distinct legal arguments, each of which attacks a different dimension of Executive Order 14203's legality.

The first argument is that the executive order exceeds the scope of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the statute Trump invoked as the primary legal authority for the sanctions. IEEPA is a broad statute that gives the president extraordinary power to regulate economic transactions in a national emergency, but it is not unlimited. The lawsuit argues that the ICC judges' judicial decisions do not constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States within any reasonable reading of that statutory standard. The threat that IEEPA authorises emergency powers to address must be real, specific, and genuinely connected to the national interest in ways that the executive order's recitations do not credibly establish. Punishing foreign judges for decisions in cases involving Afghanistan and Israel does not constitute a national emergency — it constitutes a policy disagreement, and IEEPA does not authorise the president to impose financial penalties on foreign nationals for having policy disagreements with his administration.

The second argument is that the executive order is not based on a genuine national emergency or extraordinary threat, as IEEPA requires, but rather on the administration's displeasure with specific judicial outcomes. A national emergency, properly understood, involves an immediate and unusual danger to the country's security, economy, or foreign policy — not an existing, slow-moving international legal proceeding in which the United States is not a party and whose judgments carry no direct legal force within the United States.

The third argument goes to the structural purpose of the sanctions themselves and is stated in some of the most pointed language in the entire complaint. The sanctions regime, the lawsuit says, is designed to exert extra-judicial pressure on these judges and their colleagues on the ICC bench by targeting their financial and other personal interests, with the objective of punishing them for prior judicial decisions and coercing them into prioritising their private interests over deciding cases on the basis of the law and facts. That is not a characterisation of legitimate sanctions policy — it is a description of coercion directed at members of a judicial body. The distinction matters legally because IEEPA does not authorise the president to use economic sanctions as a mechanism for coercing foreign judicial officers into changing their decisions.

The fourth argument concerns judicial independence as a principle of international law. The lawsuit contends that sanctions against sitting judges undermine the legitimacy of the ICC and intimidate other officials who may be overseeing sensitive cases involving powerful states. If a judge can be financially ruined for decisions her court has made, judicial independence — the foundational principle that judges must be free to decide cases without fear of personal consequences from powerful parties to those cases — is not merely weakened but destroyed. No court, domestic or international, can function as a court rather than as an instrument of political power if its members can be sanctioned by the most powerful state in the world for the content of their decisions.

The Prior Litigation Record: Four Cases Before This One

Wednesday's lawsuit is the fifth legal challenge to Executive Order 14203. That context matters enormously because it means the courts have already had multiple opportunities to evaluate the executive order's legality, and the record of those earlier cases is not encouraging for the administration.

In prior cases brought by lawyers, academic scholars, and civil society organisations whose work with the ICC was affected by the sanctions, courts have found the order unconstitutional because it imposes impermissible free speech limitations on those assisting the ICC. District Judge Richard J. Leon, in a case involving UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, granted a preliminary injunction finding that the sanctions against her violated the First Amendment, writing that she had done nothing more than speak and that the government's sanctioning of Albanese for her speech was overbroad. Foley Hoag's Andrew Loewenstein, who serves as co-counsel for Judge Prost, had previously brought a challenge on behalf of two international criminal law professors in the Southern District of New York, arguing the application of the sanctions regime to US persons violated the First Amendment — and the court ultimately agreed, producing another injunction.

Wednesday's case is different from those prior challenges in one critical respect: it is the first lawsuit brought by the designated judges themselves, as the primary targets of the sanctions, rather than by US persons whose ability to work with the ICC was affected. The legal theory is therefore somewhat different — focused on whether the executive order's application to the judges exceeds IEEPA's scope and fails to identify a genuine national emergency, rather than on First Amendment rights of US persons — and the standing posture is different, with the judges themselves as direct victims of the sanctions rather than third parties whose operations were affected.

The Administration's Response

A White House official responded to the filing with a statement that did not engage with any of the specific legal arguments but restated the administration's general position. Trump, the official said, lawfully exercised his authority under IEEPA in imposing the sanctions, which dealt with an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States involving the International Criminal Court, including the ICC's illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel. The administration will continue to vigorously defend the President's actions — protecting the national security and foreign policy of our country first and foremost, the official added.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on pending litigation but said the ICC continues to present a threat to our sovereignty and our national interests.

Neither statement addressed the specific legal arguments in the complaint, the documented personal harm to the judges, or the prior judicial findings that the executive order exceeds its statutory authority in certain applications. That is standard litigation posture — the administration will file a formal response when required by the court.

The administration is expected to raise sovereign immunity as a preliminary defence, arguing that foreign nationals cannot sue the US government in federal court for the exercise of executive power. The judges' lawyers will contest that defence, arguing that IEEPA itself creates a cause of action for judicial review of sanctions designations and that the court has jurisdiction to assess whether the executive order complies with the statute's requirements.

The names on the opposite side of the complaint, alongside Trump, are Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Bradley Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control — a roster that maps precisely onto the structure of the sanctions apparatus the executive order created.

The Historical Precedent and What Makes This Different

The US-ICC relationship has always been complicated. The United States signed the Rome Statute establishing the ICC under President Clinton in 2000 but never ratified it. The Bush administration rescinded the signature in 2002. During his first term, Trump sanctioned ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in 2020 for her investigation into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan — a move that was deeply controversial but targeted a single individual in a prosecutorial role. Biden lifted those sanctions and moved toward limited cooperation with the court, particularly in connection with the 2023 arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

What makes the current sanctions campaign fundamentally different from its predecessor is scale and purpose. The first Trump administration targeted one prosecutor for one investigation. The second has targeted at least nine judges, two deputy prosecutors, a UN Special Rapporteur, three Palestinian human rights organisations, and the chief prosecutor for a range of past decisions — some of them made years before the sanctioning. The expansion of the campaign beyond the Afghanistan investigation to encompass every decision related to Israel has transformed what was once a punitive measure targeting a specific prosecution into what the International Bar Association and numerous European governments have described as a systematic attempt to coerce the court's entire bench into making different decisions in pending and future cases.

The judges say, in their complaint, that the sanctions bar the submission of evidence and argument in any pending or future proceedings before them. That is not a side effect of the sanctions — it is a mechanism that prevents judges from doing the work of judging. A judge who cannot receive evidence, hear argument, or act on the record before her is not a judge functioning as a judge. She is a sanctioned individual sitting in a courthouse in The Hague, unable to perform the judicial duties for which she was elected by the states parties to the Rome Statute.

What Happens Next

The case, United States v. Benson equivalent — formally filed in the Southern District of New York — will now proceed to a response from the Justice Department. After that response, the district court will decide whether the judges are entitled to the declaratory and injunctive relief they are seeking: a declaration that the executive order is unlawful as applied to them, their removal from the OFAC sanctions list, the unfreezing of any blocked property, and a prohibition on the government continuing to enforce the measures against them.

Any appeal of the district court's decision would go to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York and could ultimately reach the Supreme Court — making this case a potential landmark in the relationship between American executive power, international institutions, and the limits of IEEPA. That path will take months or years to complete.

In the meantime, three judges sit in The Hague with frozen accounts, cancelled cards, and restricted access to the basic financial services that the modern world treats as default. They cannot book travel without elaborate workarounds. They cannot order from Amazon. They cannot, in one judge's words, lead normal lives — and the reason they cannot is that they voted as judges in judicial proceedings that the most powerful executive branch in the world found politically inconvenient.

They were called to adjudicate matters before them and faithfully discharged their judicial offices by rendering decisions with which the administration disagrees. That formulation — drawn from their own complaint — is the most precise possible description of what judges are supposed to do. It is also, under Executive Order 14203, the reason they are on a sanctions list. Three of them have decided they will not accept that premise without a fight, and they have chosen to fight it in the American courts that the executive branch controls.

Whether those courts will hear their argument, credit it, and grant them relief is the question that the next chapter of this case will answer.

Sources

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