Brussels / Rome — 18 August 2026
No Peace Without Justice condemns in the strongest terms the sanctions imposed by the United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tomoko Akane, President of the International Criminal Court, and Abdoulaye Seye, a senior trial lawyer at the Court and a judicial candidate at the Court’s upcoming elections, under Executive Order 14203. The formal designation freezes any US assets the two may hold, but its real effect reaches far beyond US jurisdiction: banks and service providers worldwide, facing correspondent-bank exposure and compliance risk rather than secondary sanctions in law, routinely over-comply by closing accounts and cutting off digital and financial services entirely, regardless of where a designated individual actually banks or lives — over-compliance the EU Blocking Statute exists specifically to prevent, and whose continued, unchecked spread is a direct consequence of the European Commission’s failure to activate it. As documented across the growing list of designated ICC officials, this can mean the loss of ordinary banking, of access to basic online services, and well-documented impact on family members unrelated to their Court work — consequences that fall unevenly depending on nationality and domicile, and that extend, through a chilling effect, to every judge, prosecutor and staff member watching how these two cases unfold, and to the human rights organisations — Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — already designated in September 2025 for their work in support of the Court’s mandate.
Article 70 of the Rome Statute gives the Court jurisdiction over offences against the administration of justice committed intentionally, including impeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court to prevent or improperly alter the performance of their duties, and retaliating against an official on account of duties performed. Secretary Marco Rubio has justified the designations by stating that Tomoko Akane and Abdoulaye Seye “directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain” American and allied personnel — language that ties the sanctions explicitly to the exercise of their judicial and prosecutorial functions, and meets the retaliation elements of Article 70(1)(e) directly. The intimidation and interference limb of Article 70(1)(d) is engaged independently: Secretary Marco Rubio has described the campaign against the Court as one to dismantle it “brick by brick, if necessary,” with further sanctions explicitly threatened as the Court continues its work — language directed at shaping the Court’s future conduct, not merely punishing its past. Neither element requires great investigatory effort to establish: both purposes are stated on the record, by the sanctioning authority itself.
Article 70(4) of the Statute imposes a clear statutory duty on States Parties to extend their domestic criminal law to conduct of this kind and, on the Court’s request, to submit it to their own competent authorities for prosecution. The Office of the Prosecutor’s own mandate under the Statute is no less engaged: fidelity to the Rome Statute leaves little room for institutional silence when retaliation of this kind is directed at the Court’s own officials and admitted on the record by the sanctioning authority itself.
A State’s decision to freeze the assets of a judge because of a judicial act is not diplomacy; it is retaliation of precisely the kind Article 70 was drafted to reach, and we call on the Assembly of States Parties to treat it as such. The same is true of unilateral measures imposed on civil society organisations for their human rights work in furtherance of the Court’s mandate: Article 70(1)(c) itself prohibits retaliation against those who provide evidence and interference with its collection — retaliation against those who provide the evidence on which the administration of justice depends is retaliation against the administration of justice itself.
That Mr Abdoulaye Seye stands as a candidate in the Court’s forthcoming judicial elections gives this designation a further, distinct dimension: it reaches beyond retaliation for past conduct into an attempt to shape who may sit on the Court’s bench, placing a financial penalty on the pursuit of judicial office itself. NPWJ takes no position on the merits of any candidacy in these elections; our concern is solely that no State should be permitted to shape the field of candidates through financial coercion.
This is not an isolated act. It is the latest in a sequence that began with Prosecutor Karim Khan in February 2025, extended to four sitting judges in June 2025, to UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese in July 2025, to two further judges and two Deputy Prosecutors on 20 August 2025, to Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in September 2025, and to two more judges in December 2025 — and now, eighteen months on, reaches Tomoko Akane, the Court’s sitting President, and Abdoulaye Seye, a sitting judicial candidate. Each designation individually narrows the space in which judicial officers, prosecutors and staff can exercise independent judgment; taken together, they describe a campaign whose object is not any single warrant or ruling but, as the Court itself has stated, “the independence of an impartial judicial institution,” pursued one official at a time. Where an institution can call on 125 States Parties and instruments such as the EU Blocking Statute for protection, an individual designated alone has no comparable recourse: their protection depends entirely on whether their own government is prepared to act, leaving them isolated in a way the Court as a whole is not. President Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and Mr Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese national, now find out what that isolation means in practice. The same pattern should be expected to recur as the Assembly moves to elect a new Prosecutor after the removal of Prosecutor Karim Khan: the Office is currently led on an interim basis by Deputy Prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, both already under US sanctions imposed in August 2025.
No Peace Without Justice calls on Japan and Senegal to extend diplomatic protection to their nationals, and on the Netherlands, as host State, to give effect to both its obligations as a State Party under Article 70(4) of the Rome Statute, and its duty under Article 43(1) of the Headquarters Agreement to ensure the protection of persons indispensable to the proper functioning of the Court. We call further on all States Parties to the Rome Statute to state publicly, individually and through the Assembly, that retaliation against Court officials for the performance of their duties will not be met with silence, nor will threats and intimidation directed at civil society organisations cooperating with the Court. We renew our call on the European Commission to activate the EU Blocking Statute (Council Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) in respect of the ICC-related sanctions regime, including against civil society partners working in furtherance of the Court’s mandate, as NPWJ and partner organisations have demanded since the Brussels demonstration of 14 April 2026 and the Madrid conference of 25 June 2026. A protective instrument left unused protects no one, and each new designation makes the cost of that inaction more concrete.
For more information, please contact: No Peace Without Justice — press@npwj.org
