by Misty Severi
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday a diplomatic effort to dismantle the International Criminal Court amid a worsening row between the court and the United States regarding sanctions.
“The International Criminal Court seeks to become the unaccountable arbiter of a new global law — empowered to prosecute and arrest our citizens at will and existentially threaten American sovereignty,” Rubio said on social media. “We will teach the ICC the full meaning of American resolve.”
The effort comes after three of the court’s judges filed a lawsuit last month against the Trump administration in New York, arguing the sanctions that were levied against them last year were unlawful. The court was created under the Rome Statute in 2002 to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Rubio accused the court in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a video on social media of being run by “globalist bureaucrats.”
“The U.S. is launching a diplomatic campaign with a simple message — sovereign states over globalism,” Rubio wrote in the op-ed. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”
The secretary also accused the ICC in his op-ed of being “backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.”
A State Department official told Reuters the tools include travel bans, visa revocations, increased sanctions against the court and diplomatic pressure on other nations to withdraw from the ICC.
The comments come after the Trump administration sanctioned the court over a case against Israel last year, in which the court issued arrest warrants for multiple Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over the war against Hamas.
Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of State for global public affairs, said on X that “the ICC and its friends are waging a war on our country – not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called ‘international law.’”
“When the ICC was born 24 years ago, they told us that it was merely a narrow backstop: a global court that would step in to prosecute only the gravest offenses – genocide and war crimes – and only when a nation’s courts were unable to prosecute them on their own,” Johnson said.
“But the truth is, it was something far more radical and extreme: a global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited,” he added.
The United States is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and is not bound by the ICC.
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Misty Severi is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
Photo “Marco Rubio” by Marco Rubio.
