Rubio Targets ICC as U.S. Law Rejects Court’s Jurisdiction Over Americans

The United States fought a War of Independence beginning in 1775 to become an independent nation, a full year before the Declaration of Independence was even drafted. Today, we are a federal republic in which citizens vote directly for their legislators and, through the Electoral College, for the president. No unelected authority in Europe should ever have sovereignty over the United States. Neither Brussels, Geneva, nor The Hague should be able to dictate the actions of U.S. citizens within U.S. borders or direct American foreign policy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on July 13 that the United States would dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to US sovereignty. The announcement came in a State Department release, a video statement, and a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Rubio wrote that the US would “dismantle the ICC”, “brick by brick, if necessary,” using “all the tools at our government’s disposal.”

The State Department said the campaign will feature a “whole-of-government response” to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American service members or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty. The statement said the ICC “poses an intolerable threat to US sovereignty” because it claims authority to prosecute American servicemen and officials, and noted that all American presidents since the court’s founding have maintained that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Americans.

Concrete steps outlined by the State Department include travel bans and visa revocations for ICC personnel, increased sanctions on the court and affiliated organizations, and pressure on allied nations to withdraw from the Rome Statute or cut off support for the court. The Wall Street Journal op-ed also said Washington would watch closely which nations join it against the court, and that countries relying on the US security umbrella are being called on to reject the ICC’s authority.

The US has never ratified the Rome Statute, the 2002 treaty that created the ICC. The American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002, passed under the Bush administration, already authorizes the use of US military force to free American or allied personnel detained by the ICC, a provision sometimes called the “Hague Invasion Act.”

The first Trump administration sanctioned the ICC prosecutor in 2020 over the court’s investigation into alleged crimes in Afghanistan involving US personnel, according to Just Security.

The current campaign follows the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza, which prompted Trump to sign an executive order sanctioning the ICC and its officials, including chief prosecutor Karim Khan, according to Novara Media. The same report noted that the administration has welcomed the ICC’s investigation into Russian conduct in Ukraine while opposing its investigations into Israeli conduct in Gaza and US conduct in Afghanistan.

Human rights organizations have pushed back on the campaign. Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said the effort was an attempt to “dress up” what he called a quest for impunity for American war crimes. A joint statement signed by national human rights organizations on July 17 called the campaign an attack on international rule of law and urged other states to defend the court, an independent judicial body created to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

The ICC has not opened any investigation on US soil. Rubio’s op-ed specifically named Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization that has called for legal examination of US deportations to El Salvador and US military strikes, on Iran.

The ICC campaign reflects a longstanding US position: rejecting the binding authority of transnational and supranational bodies over US citizens and foreign policy, a stance held across administrations. Being a signatory is the exception rather than the rule. The United States has joined a small number of major multilateral agreements, such as the UN Charter, NATO, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it has never ratified the Rome Statute establishing the ICC, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others.

It is also important to note that the United States is not opposed to the goals of many of these organizations or treaties, but rather to the loss of sovereignty that ratification could entail. However, the United States is the world’s leading enforcer of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and has assisted in the apprehension of individuals wanted by the ICC.

On January 7, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States.” The order directed the United States to withdraw from 66 international organizations, according to NPR. These included the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

Earlier in 2025, the administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the World Health Organization, and the UN Human Rights Council, ended funding for UNRWA, and announced the United States’ withdrawal from UNESCO, which will take effect at the end of 2026.

Even multilateral agreements led by the United States represent a loss of sovereignty that the Trump administration opposes. The USMCA, a trade pact Trump signed during his first term, replaced NAFTA in 2020. On July 1, 2026, during the agreement’s mandatory six-year review, the Trump administration declined to renew it in its current form. That decision triggered a 10-year countdown of mandatory annual reviews leading to its scheduled expiration in 2036.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has said Trump is weighing full withdrawal from the agreement. Any formal exit, however, would require six months’ notice and, according to a 2020 Senate Finance Committee report, arguably congressional consent because USMCA is a congressionally approved trade agreement.

The United States has never ratified the Rome Statute or subjected itself to the ICC. Viewed in this context, the Trump administration’s actions against the ICC are consistent with the past 80 years of U.S. foreign policy.