Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced 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.
Rubio said in a video statement that when the ICC was created more than two decades ago, the world was told that the court “would step in to prosecute only the gravest offenses” such as genocide and war crimes, and “only when a nation’s courts were unable to prosecute them on their own.”
Instead of serving this purpose, Rubio said, the court is a “global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited.”
“Independence is our birthright,” Rubio declared. “We will never let foreign bureaucrats take that away from us.”
Rubio’s moves against the ICC include diplomatic calls highlighting the entity’s abuses, scrutiny of nations refusing to reject the ICC’s self-proclaimed authority, visa revocations for ICC personnel, and other actions.
Reiterating his efforts in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Rubio said the U.S. will “dismantle” the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary.”
The Department of Justice has also declared that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Americans.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote a letter addressed to ICC President, Judge Tomoko Akane, stating that the ICC has “disregarded its own complementarity requirement, and pursued investigations that appear driven as much by political pressure and institutional self-interest as by legal merit.”
“The Department of Justice is fully committed to defending our Nation’s sovereignty and protecting the rights of U.S. persons against unlawful international overreach,” Blanche’s letter adds. “Our Constitution — the supreme law of the land — vests the judicial power of the United States in its own courts, and our legal system is the envy of the world. The United States will not subordinate the liberty and security of our people to a foreign tribunal in The Hague with no accountability to any electorate or fidelity to the Constitution.”
