On 9 October, hours after the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, one of the International Criminal Court’s founding judges, the Trump administration designated the court itself for sanctions. The measures block the court’s property in the United States and prohibit the provision of funds, goods or services to it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the move in terms that left little room for ambiguity, vowing to dismantle the institution piece by piece unless it ended what Washington regards as a threat to American citizens. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a serious blow to international criminal justice.

The headline reading is that the court’s survival is now in question. That is true, but it locates the drama in the wrong place. The most consequential detail of the executive order is not the designation but the delay attached to it: a set of general licences granting a 180-day reprieve for activity needed to maintain the court’s operations, explicitly intended to give states parties time to show progress on resolving American concerns. The ultimatum, in other words, is not really addressed to judges in The Hague. It is addressed to the 125 governments that fund, staff and politically sustain the court. By early April 2027, those governments, and European ones in particular, will have to decide whether they are prepared to absorb real costs to keep an institution they created functioning.

From individuals to infrastructure

The October designation is the end point of a steady escalation. Sanctions began with the then-prosecutor in February 2025 and widened, round by round, to judges and senior prosecutors linked to the Palestine and Afghanistan investigations. By August 2026, nine of the court’s 18 judges were under US sanctions, along with both deputy prosecutors, and three judges had sued the administration in federal court in New York. The legal instrument is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which, as former US ambassador-at-large Beth van Schaack has noted, has typically been used against terrorist organisations, drug cartels and indicted war criminals.

Individual sanctions disrupted lives: credit cards cancelled, bookings refused, travel complicated. Entity-wide sanctions target something more fundamental, which is the court’s operational plumbing. The ICC’s own registrar has disclosed that an internal assessment following the first round of sanctions found that roughly 92 per cent of its judicial processes depended directly or indirectly on US companies or firms with a significant US nexus. Cloud hosting, case-management software, secure communications, banking and insurance all sit on infrastructure that answers, ultimately, to US jurisdiction. The court has launched an effort it calls Operation Tech Autonomy to remove single points of external dependency, but rebuilding a judicial institution’s digital backbone in six months is an engineering problem, not a political statement.

The exposure extends beyond the court’s walls. Legal advisers have warned NGOs that routine activity such as gathering evidence, transmitting dossiers or assisting victims could potentially be construed as providing services to a designated entity, and that even purely European firms face what one lawyer called secondary-designation exposure. The predictable result is over-compliance: multinational vendors and banks withdrawing not because they are legally required to, but because the cost of being wrong is asymmetric. Witness protection, the least visible and most vulnerable part of the court’s work, depends on exactly these service providers.

A court already weakened from within

It would be analytically convenient to treat the sanctions as an external shock to an otherwise stable institution. They are not. Washington’s pressure lands on a court already dealing with the most serious internal crisis in its history. In July, the Assembly of States Parties concluded by a vote of 82 states that Prosecutor Karim Khan had committed serious misconduct and a serious breach of his duties, removing him from office. The Office of the Prosecutor is being run on an interim basis by two deputies, both of whom are themselves sanctioned, and the search for a successor must now take place under a regime that penalises anyone who works with the court.

At the same time, five states, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Venezuela and Chad, have formally begun withdrawing from the Rome Statute, and the State Department has openly welcomed further departures. The Sahel juntas justified their exit by describing the court as a tool of neocolonial repression. That language is self-serving from governments facing scrutiny over their own conduct, but it draws on a critique of selective prosecution that has circulated across the Global South for two decades and has never been fully answered. The point is not that the critique validates the sanctions. It is that Washington is exploiting fractures it did not create, and that the court enters this confrontation with a thinner reserve of legitimacy than its defenders tend to acknowledge.

The pressure is also not exclusively American. The court operates under sanctions from both the United States and Russia, the latter retaliation for the court’s March 2023 arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin over the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children. The convergence is striking. Two permanent members of the Security Council that agree on very little have both concluded that the court’s jurisdiction over their nationals, or those of their allies, is illegitimate. For a court whose founding premise was that accountability should not depend on great-power consent, that alignment is the clearest measure of how far the operating environment has shifted since 2002.

There is one counter-signal worth noting. Hungary, which announced its withdrawal in 2025, rescinded its notice in May 2026. Withdrawal, in other words, remains a political choice that can be reversed, and the direction of travel among states parties is not uniformly away from the court.

The ultimatum is really for Europe

What Washington wants is, at its core, a jurisdictional concession. The court has long held that crimes committed by nationals of non-member states on the territory of member states fall within its reach, the legal basis for both the Afghanistan investigation and the arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. The United States rejects that principle outright, and has framed the court as exercising authority over it and its allies without consent. No state party can concede the point without rewriting the logic of the Rome Statute itself, which is why any negotiated settlement is likely to take the form of practical restraint rather than formal amendment.

The diplomatic reaction to the October designation was swift but revealing. A joint statement by Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom expressed strong disagreement and a commitment to continue supporting the court’s work. The European Commission said the EU stood ready to take any necessary measures, yet in the same breath expressed hope that the six-month delay meant there was room for dialogue, a sentiment echoed by High Representative Kaja Kallas and by Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, whose country hosts the court.

That instinct to read the grace period as an opening for negotiation is understandable, but it rests on an uncertain premise. Van Schaack, who served as Washington’s ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, has warned that states may make concessions only to find the administration does not move. The practical alternative under discussion is the EU’s blocking statute, which would prohibit European firms from complying with US sanctions and allow them to recover damages. Diplomats in The Hague say the mechanisms are prepared. Whether they are activated is a different question.

Here Europe faces the same structural dilemma it confronted in 2018, when the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions. Brussels brought an updated blocking statute into force in August 2018, instructing European firms not to comply with Washington’s demands and allowing them to recover damages. Even as the measure was being prepared, the Commission’s own financial services commissioner conceded it would be of limited use for banks given the global reach of finance, and numerous European companies withdrew from Iran regardless. Legal protection inside the EU could not shield them from losing access to the US market and to dollar clearing, and the statute became a symbol of political intent rather than an instrument of economic protection. The ICC case is smaller in financial terms but harder in political ones. A court hosted in a NATO member state, funded largely by European treasuries, and targeted by Europe’s principal security guarantor turns an abstract debate about strategic autonomy into a concrete test with a deadline. If the EU cannot keep a single judicial institution operational against US pressure, the credibility of its broader ambitions on technological and financial sovereignty will be difficult to sustain.

A testing ground, not an endpoint

The French jurist Julian Fernandez has described the ICC as a testing ground for other US levers of influence. The framing deserves attention. Entity-wide sanctions on a treaty-based international organisation whose members include almost every close American ally have no real precedent. Harvard Law commentators had already described the earlier designations of judges as a significant intensification of a long-standing tension; the institutional designation goes further, establishing that the full apparatus of economic coercion can be turned on a multilateral body when Washington judges its decisions adverse to US or allied interests. Once that template exists, its application need not stop at The Hague. The more relevant question for other international bodies is not whether they share the ICC’s mandate, but whether they share its dependence on American infrastructure.

What survival will actually look like

The court is unlikely to close in April. Institutions of this kind rarely end in a single moment; they contract. Three broad outcomes are plausible. In the first, states parties seek an accommodation, perhaps through quiet pressure on the most contentious investigations or procedural slowdowns that no government formally requests but many tacitly welcome. The court survives in name, with its independence quietly discounted. In the second, Europe activates the blocking statute, finances the court’s technological migration, and accepts the friction with Washington that follows. The court survives as a smaller, more European institution, with its claim to universality weaker even as its operational resilience improves. In the third, states parties hesitate, vendors over-comply, and the court continues to function on paper while losing the capacity to protect witnesses, secure evidence and recruit staff.

None of these outcomes depends primarily on what happens inside the courtroom. The judges will keep hearing cases for as long as they are able. The decisive variable is whether the governments that created the court in 1998 are willing to pay for it in 2027 in a currency they have so far avoided spending: open confrontation with the United States. The 180-day clock is, in that sense, less a countdown on the ICC than a measure of how much the rules-based order is actually worth to those who most often invoke it.