The Trump administration is taking further action against the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing the entity of ignoring legitimate crimes and instead targeting U.S. service members.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott told Fox News Digital that the ICC has “violated international law by targeting the United States and American servicemen” while “repeatedly turned a blind eye to the abuses of despotic regimes that fund terrorism, brutally suppress and torture their citizens, and carry out crimes against humanity.”
Pigott pledged that the United States “will continue its diplomatic campaign to systematically dismantle the court.”
Pigott’s comments build upon Secretary of State Marco Rubio previous announcment that he has launched a campaign to dismantle the dangers posed by the International Criminal Court to the nation’s sovereignty. According to the State Department, the ICC is an “intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty” by claiming the “authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest.”
The ICC has not only opened an investigation into U.S. servicemen, but seeks to place itself as a “supranational enforcement arm of a globalist bureaucracy empowered to persecute American servicemen and officials at will,” the State Department said.
The Trump administration has also been sued by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Open Society Institute, arguing that sanctions imposed upon the ICC prevent it from carrying out its duties.
The complaint asserts that Trump’s order “authorizes draconian sanctions.” Describing such “draconian sanctions,” the filing calls the Trump administration’s actions an “unlawful abuse of power constituting a frontal attack on the rule of law, the independence of judges, prosecutors, and lawyers, basic precepts undergirding the international legal order, and the principle of equal access to justice.”
