President Joe Biden is lifting sanctions on International Criminal Court officials investigating alleged war crimes by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, reversing a punishment imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration in a dispute over U.S. sovereignty rights.
“These decisions reflect our assessment that the measures adopted were inappropriate and ineffective,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday. “We continue to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations.”
ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda angered Trump administration officials by opening an investigation of U.S. military behavior in Afghanistan, an investigation launched even though the United States and Afghanistan have not agreed to be subject to the authority of the court. Biden’s team shares that objection, but Blinken implied that the diplomatic costs of blacklisting Bensouda and her team is not worth the benefit.
“We maintain our long-standing objection to the court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction over personnel of non-states parties such as the United States and Israel,” Blinken said. “We believe, however, that our concerns about these cases would be better addressed through engagement with all stakeholders in the ICC process rather than through the imposition of sanctions.”
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Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revoked the visas of multiple ICC officials in 2019, a decision that foreshadowed the imposition of sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top lieutenants at the ICC, Phakiso Mochochoko, in retaliation for the ICC’s decision to authorize a war crimes investigation.
“This is yet another reminder of what happens when multilateral bodies lack oversight and responsible leadership and become instead a vehicle for political vendettas,” Pompeo said last March. “The ICC has today stumbled into a sorry affirmation of every denunciation made by its harshest critics over the past three decades.”
European officials and analysts, many of whom already regarded Pompeo as hostile to multilateral diplomatic centers such as the European Union or the United Nations, were conditioned to see that complaint “as a blatant attack on the international rule of law,” as European Council on Foreign Relations senior policy fellow Anthony Dworkin put it last year.
“The tension between the vision of justice embodied by the ICC and the realities of international power politics has been present from the start and has been particularly marked in the court’s fluctuating and turbulent relationship with the U.S.,” Dworkin wrote.
Blinken, who is continuing Pompeo’s practice of foregrounding China’s human rights abuses in the intensifying rivalry between Washington and Beijing, implied that he wanted to avoid such brand damage.
“Our support for the rule of law, access to justice, and accountability for mass atrocities are important U.S. national security interests that are protected and advanced by engaging with the rest of the world to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow,” he said.
U.S. officials have been “concerned that foreign powers, like Russia, are also manipulating the ICC in pursuit of their own agenda,” then-Attorney General William Barr said last year. Blinken didn’t address that issue directly but touted “a broad range of reforms” under consideration.
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“We are encouraged that states parties to the Rome statute are considering a broad range of reforms to help the court prioritize its resources and to achieve its core mission of serving as a court of last resort in punishing and deterring atrocity crimes,” he said. “We think this reform is a worthwhile effort.”
